Top 35 Marguerite Young Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t blindly follow any leader.”

— Marguerite Young

2. “When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn’t any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbl.”

— Marguerite Young

3. “If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don’t blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss.”

— Marguerite Young

4. “Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.”

— Marguerite Young

5. “Life has no beginning, middle or end.”

— Marguerite Young

6. “All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.”

— Marguerite Young

7. “A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.”

— Marguerite Young

8. “I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.”

— Marguerite Young

9. “I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.”

— Marguerite Young

10. “I’m as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I’m much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.”

— Marguerite Young

11. “At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 – of old age.”

— Marguerite Young

12. “I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.”

— Marguerite Young

13. “All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.”

— Marguerite Young

14. “I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world-and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing, meaningful above and beyond the necessary and elemental data of my subject.”

— Marguerite Young

15. “I’ve been willing to go for years without publishing. That’s been my career.”

— Marguerite Young

16. “I don’t believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.”

— Marguerite Young

17. “I think there is a rage against women. I’ve come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.”

— Marguerite Young

18. “A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don’t mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it’s a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.”

— Marguerite Young

19. “If you don’t have obsessions, don’t write. my characters are obsessed.”

— Marguerite Young

20. “It was never reveille in this windy world.”

— Marguerite Young

21. “I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.”

— Marguerite Young

22. “I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.”

— Marguerite Young

23. “For me, a plain Middle Westerner, there is no middle way. I am in love with whatever is eccentric, devious, strange, singular, unique, out of this world – and with life as an incalculable, a chaotic thing.”

— Marguerite Young

24. “Twice in his life Eugene Victor Debs took the long leap to the Ultima Thule of prison, passing beyond the realm of the acceptable into the nonacceptable, from respectability into the criminal community of the monster who was an enemy to the people.”

— Marguerite Young

25. “The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.”

— Marguerite Young

26. “I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.”

— Marguerite Young

27. “There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don’t want to name names but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don’t even know.”

— Marguerite Young

28. “The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.”

— Marguerite Young

29. “I would never write realistic prose. I don’t like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.”

— Marguerite Young

30. “I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don’t really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition. Clear back to “Don Quixote.” I never decided to write in a “new way” at all. It’s realism that’s fairly new. Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?”

— Marguerite Young

31. “Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.”

— Marguerite Young

32. “If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.”

— Marguerite Young

33. “Forgive this breaking body as you forgive the star, the star whispering in the wind when the star is no more. Forgive this secret none can tell. None can tell and live.”

— Marguerite Young

34. “All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.”

— Marguerite Young

35. “When the dream came into being, I always pursued it.”

— Marguerite Young

36. “If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin.”

— Marguerite Young

37. “Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?”

— Marguerite Young

38. “I’m quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.”

— Marguerite Young

39. “He is but as the stubble of the field, and yet he has no beard.”

— Marguerite Young