Mary MacLane Quotes

I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.

I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children — who plays the virtuous woman. . . . May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.

I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.

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.

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.

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

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

I never give my real self. I have a hundred sides, and I turn first one way and then the other. I am playing a deep game. I have a number of strong cards up my sleeve. I have never been myself, excepting to two friends.

Genius of a kind has always been with me; an empty heart that has taken on a certain wooden quality; an excellent, strong woman's body and a pitiably starved soul.

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

The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.

The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.

I want to live quietly.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.

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

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.

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

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

Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.

But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.