Mary MacLane Quotes

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.

  Mary MacLane

• The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.

  Mary MacLane

• 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.

  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

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

  Mary MacLane

• Of poets I put Virgil first – he was greatest.

  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

• 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

• 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

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

  Mary MacLane

• I’ve never made plans for more than a day ahead.

  Mary MacLane

• I would rather be a fairly happy wife and mother.

  Mary MacLane

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

  Mary MacLane

• 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

• I want to live quietly.

  Mary MacLane

• I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.

  Mary MacLane

Mary MacLane (29)

Birth:	1st May, 1881
Death:	August, 1929
Nationality:	American, Canadian
Profession:	Writer

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd January

Births

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• 1935 - Pete du Pont
• 1858 - Beatrice Webb
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• 1981 - Willa Ford

Deaths

• 2003 - Marvin Bower
• 1968 - Duke Kahanamoku
• 2005 - Rose Mary Woods
• 1994 - Telly Savalas
• 1903 - Augustus Hare