Mary Maclane Quotes

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

... some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains. ~ Mary MacLane

Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave. ~ Mary MacLane

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother. ~ Mary MacLane

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

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

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

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

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as "confessional." She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic's courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional…

I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don't know how or why yet. ~ Kate Zambreno

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

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary. ~ Mary MacLane

I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness. ~ Mary MacLane

Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest. ~ Mary MacLane

... the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly - by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious. ~ Mary MacLane

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

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

I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting ... ~ Mary MacLane

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

And is it worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one's mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one's heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descend to evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else. ~ Mary MacLane

From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me. ~ Mary MacLane

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

I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile. ~ Mary MacLane

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. ~ Mary MacLane

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

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

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

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

I start reading every Elizabeth Wurtzel essay with optimism, like maybe finally she put her talent to writing about something than herself, and by the end of paragraph three that optimism has fled. So maybe you know Wurtzel has written an essay for New York Magazine? Probably you know, because for whatever reason, Wurtzel provokes a deep need in people to talk about how much they hate Wurtzel. So the comments are hundreds deep, Twitter is ablaze, and here I am, writing this blog post.

And actually, she reminds me of Mary MacLane. She was a 19-year-old girl who wrote a memoir called I Await the Devil's Coming in 1901 and it was an instant success. I wrote the introduction to the upcoming reissue, and there I talk about what a deeply interesting book it was. Not only "for its time," but also it's just kind of visceral and nasty and snarling, yet elegantly written.

I kept thinking about MacLane, after the introduction got handed in and things went off to press. But this time, it wasn't her writing that interested me, it was the way she never wrote anything very interesting ever again. She got stunted, somehow, winning all of that acclaim for being a young, sour thing. And I wondered if it was the fame that stunted her, because she spent the rest of her career spitting out copies of the memoir that made her famous. And it worked, until it didn't. ~ Jenna Crispin

If you ever feel to express proper gratitude for the good things of this life, be sure that you express your gratitude for the right thing. Very likely you will not have a great deal of gratitude, and you must not waste any of it but what you do have will be of the most excellent quality. For it will accumulate, and the accumulation will all go to quality. And the things for which you are to be grateful are the bitternesses you have known.

If you have had it in mind ever to give way to bursts of gratitude for this air that comes from off the salt sea, for that line of pearls and violets that you see just above the horizon, for the health of your body, for the sleep that comes to you at the close of the day, for any of those things, then get rid of the idea at once. Those things are quite well, but they are not really given to you. They are merely placed where any one can reach them with little effort. The kind fates don't care whether you get them or not. Their responsibility ends when they leave them there.

But the bitternesses they give to each person separately. They give you yours, Mary MacLane, for your very own. Don't say they never think of you. ~ Mary MacLane

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature - like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines ~ Mary MacLane

Work as smart as you are able. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

The most perfect education ... is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart. Or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Desire is oblivious to time and place, dear Mary. I want you, Mary. Please trust me, my sweet. Let me show you the ways of love."
She stared back at him, her body filled with the want he had described, but common sense held her surrender at bay.
"Love? Don't speak of love to me. You describe meaningless pleasure. It has nothing to do with love!"
He gave her a roguish smile. "Pleasure is never meaningless, my sweet. ~ Victoria Vane

He'd gotten in a quick swipe with his tongue the moment he'd been close enough to reach. Then, just to be sure, he went in for another sample, bathing Alex's leg with saliva, careful to miss the dangly bits between the man's legs. Edgar didn't get what the big deal was. He licked himself there all the time. However, Jack made a big deal out of it so he avoided that area like he'd been taught. ~ Mary J. Williams

(Later, I'l learn that's the structure of an elegy: lament, consolation; bad news, followed by good news.) ~ Mary Karr

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler. ~ Mary Norris

It portrayed motherhood as the highest position that a woman could achieve. For God had made Mary neither a prophet nor the messiah nor the daughter of God. Nor did God take the form of a woman. She was only the womb. She was a perpetual virgin too, and she endured the vilest harassment because of it, or so the story went. Rebecca couldn't relate to the Virgin Mary at all. ~ Jeffry R. Halverson

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado. ~ Mary McCarthy

Funny, one somehow imagines her snuffing quietly out now, the way the moon would if the sun vanished. ~ Mary Stewart

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies ... It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death. ~ Mary Roberts Rinehart

Making verses is almost as common as taking snuff, and God can tell what miserable stuff people carry about in their pockets, and offer to all their acquaintances, and you know one cannot refuse reading and taking a pinch. ~ Mary Wortley Montagu

I am malicious because I am miserable ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Looking out the rain-fogged window at the gray November day, Mary felt almost grateful for the snug warmth of her well-heated chamber. Escape, the captive queen decided with a yawn, would have to wait until spring. ~ Margaret George

Like all Earthlings at the point of death, Mary Young sent faint reminders of herself to those who had known her. She released a small cloud of telepathic butterflies, and one of these brushed the cheek of Dwayne Hoover, nine miles away. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

She learned a lot and some of the things she learned were hard to accept. She was made to realize once and for all that this earth on which they lived turning about in space did not revolve, as she had believed, for the sake of little people. "Nor for big people either," she reminded the boy when she saw his secret smile. ~ Mary Norton

Mary Poppins is magical and fun. ~ Julie Andrews

Healthy choices thread through every aspect of life. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

Mathematics had never had more than a secondary interest for him [her husband, George Boole]; and even logic he cared for chiefly as a means of clearing the ground of doctrines imagined to be proved, by showing that the evidence on which they were supposed to give rest had no tendency to prove them. ~ Mary Everest Boole

I'd laboured over it a long while, and labour brings a thing near the heart's core. ~ Mary Webb

You are usually in a different universe," she said, "one that revolves about you. The Peninsula was full of rude, blustering officers who believed other people had been created to pay them homage. I always thought they were merely silly and best ignored. ~ Mary Balogh

To-day women constitute the only class of sane people excluded from the franchise ... ~ Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi

One of my all-time favorite photographers is Irving Penn. I wish I could have watched him work. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

When we arrived in England, we could almost feel the excitement in the air. Banners, pictures, and other decorations hung everywhere, and the streets were packed with people waiting to celebrate the wedding of the century. The formal party in honor of the royal match was held on the evening of Monday, July 27--two nights before the wedding. That day I felt nervous with anticipation as I lunched with a friend and went to the hairdresser. Pat met Exxon colleagues for lunch near their office in Mayfair. As he described our plans for the upcoming ball and wedding, Pat began to feel totally overwhelmed by the importance and glamour of these royal events. So my darling husband excused himself, walked over to Green Park just across from the palace, and simply collapsed with nervous strain to nap on a quiet patch of grass for the afternoon. I've always envied his ability to tune out and relax when he's under stress; I get tense and can't eat or sleep. ~ Mary Robertson

I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be in formed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be. ~ Mary Shelley

Dare to dream of your great success. Become intimate with those things which deeply motivate you and regularly work toward the realization of that mission. ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

Or maybe it's about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you. ~ Mary Oliver

His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Orthodox Judaism is a thicket of detailed injunctions, Biblical commandments elaborated during centuries of prohibited proselytizing, functioning to limit interaction with outsiders. At the opposite extreme, Islam, still the most rapidly expanding of faiths, demands little immediate knowledge from those who would convert. The convert is permitted to enter and then to learn by participation, although there are plenty of detailed regulations and abstruse theological ideas to be pursued later, and the regulations do effectively separate believers from nonbelievers. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

The government here is entirely in the hands of the army. The Grand Signor [Ottoman Sultan], with all his absolute power, is as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a janissary's frown. ~ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

it seemed entirely possible to him that religion and literature and art and music were all merely side effects of a brain structure that comes into the world ready to make language out of noise, sense out of chaos. Our capacity for imposing meaning, he thought, is programmed to unfold the way a butterfly's wings unfold when it escapes the chrysalis, ready to fly. We are biologically driven to create meaning. And if that's so, he asked himself, is the miracle diminished? It ~ Mary Doria Russell

George Bailey: [on Mary being caught naked in the bushes after her robe slips off] This is a very interesting situation!
Mary: Please give me my robe.
George Bailey: A man doesn't get in a situation like this every day.
Mary: I'd like to have my robe.
George Bailey: Not in Bedford Falls anyway.
Mary: [after the bushes' thorns starting hurting her] Ouch! Oh!
George Bailey: Gezundheit.
Mary: George Bailey!
George Bailey: Inspires a little thought!
Mary: Give me my robe.
George Bailey: I've read about things like this.
Mary: Shame on you! I'm going to tell your mother on you.
George Bailey: Well, my mother is way up on the corner.
Mary: I'll call the police!
George Bailey: Well, they're all the way downtown. They'd be on my side.
Mary: Then I'll scream!
George Bailey: Maybe I can sell tickets. ~ It's A Wonderful Life

The much-quoted immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary occurred but once so that the world might know that Almighty God, when He so chooses, has no need of men, though He cannot dispense with women. ~ Jose Saramago

Dreams and knowing are two different things. ~ Mary E. Pearson