Top 22 Mary MacLane Quotes

The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Of poets I put Virgil first – he was greatest.

I want to live quietly.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.