Quotes from Mary MacLane

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be.

I am a genius. Then it amused me to keep saying so, but now it does not. I expected to be happy sometime. Now I know I shall never be.

I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.

I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.

One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.

When I was three years old I was taken with my family to a little town in Western Minnesota, where I lived a more or less vapid and ordinary life until I was ten.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be.

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.

I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.

Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings…

One's thoughts are one's most crucial adventures. Seriously and strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting…

I Don't Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don't know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don't know that I wouldn't deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don't know on the other hand that I would: I don't know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don't know that I mayn't be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.

I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.

I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.

Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?