Top 60 Mary MacLane Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I write every day. Writing is a necessity – like eating.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

3. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

4. “An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.”

— Mary MacLane

5. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

6. “I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

9. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

10. “I want to live quietly.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

13. “I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

15. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

17. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

18. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

19. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

20. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

21. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

22. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

23. “People say of me, ‘She’s peculiar.’ They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.”

— Mary MacLane

24. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

25. “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. There are too many such in the world now.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

27. “May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity – a virtuous woman.”

— Mary MacLane

28. “There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.”

— Mary MacLane

29. “It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

31. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

34. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

35. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

36. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

37. “But I am too young yet to think of peace. It is not peace that I want. Peace is for forty or fifty. I am waiting for my Experience.”

— Mary MacLane

38. “As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship – a thing that is earth-old.”

— Mary MacLane

39. “I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.”

— Mary MacLane

40. “But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.”

— Mary MacLane

41. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

43. “I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.”

— Mary MacLane

44. “I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting – some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.”

— Mary MacLane

45. “When I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between a mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few.”

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

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

— Mary MacLane

48. “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.”

— Mary MacLane

49. “However great one’s gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.”

— Mary MacLane

50. “Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen, there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end.”

— Mary MacLane