Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.
Mary MacLane

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.
Mary MacLane

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.
Mary MacLane

I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.
Mary MacLane

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.
Mary MacLane

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.
Mary MacLane

I love devils.
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

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

I want to live quietly.
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 was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be.
Mary MacLane

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

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

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

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

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

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