Esther Markussen

“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

“I think people often try to find through sex things that are much easier to find in other ways.”
― Claire Morgan, The Price of Salt, or Carol

“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, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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