Mary MacLane > Quotes

“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, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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, The Story of Mary Maclane

“I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.”
― Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary Maclane

“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.”
― Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary Maclane

“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings…”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness: I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don't like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.

It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, 'Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,' and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“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, My Friend Annabel Lee

“I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.”
― Mary Maclane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“If it please the Devil, one day I may have happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.

But meanwhile I shall eat.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'

And I will answer: 'Yes.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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, I Await the Devil's Coming

“This article is going to be very egotistical and MacLanesque and maybe somewhat shocking besides, so I strongly advise divers citizens of Butte not to read it. It occurs to me that some of the things I write do not agree with the constitutions of the said citizens - it seems to be bad for their livers - hence this preliminary note of warning. So now if you go right on and read it and it affects your liver unpleasantly, don't blame me.”
― Mary MacLane

“It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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, I Await the Devil's Coming

“…the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly—by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“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, The Story of Mary MacLane

“Had I been born a man I would by now have made a deep impression of myself on the world - on some part of it. But I am a woman, and God, or the Devil, or Fate, or whosoever it was, has flayed me of the thick outer skin and thrown me out into the midst of Life - has left me a lonely damned thing filled with the red, red blood of ambition and desire, but afraid to be touched, for there is no thick skin between my sensitive flesh and the and world s fingers.
But I want to be touched.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“…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, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“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.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“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, I Await the Devil's Coming

“When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought, - and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And
when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.
But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said, - I will know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was even more lonely; and everything was still harder to understand.
And again I said - faintly - everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed
to think how stupid I have been - and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.
For I know that it will not be different.
I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“And always while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there’s a treachery in it.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming