Mary MacLane Quotes - Page 2

When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it a marriage.

Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that it was literature, because it is real and because it was well written. And I know that the world wants such things.

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.

When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall never be in love - and I no longer wish to be.

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.

It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

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.

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.

at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

Except two breeds - the stupid and the narrowly feline - all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.

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

I write every day. Writing is a necessity - like eating.

Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'And I will answer: 'Yes.

Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?

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

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

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.

My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

I've never made plans for more than a day ahead.

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

I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing, and then she read the book.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.