Mary MacLane

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines”

“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.”

“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.”

“The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”