When I wrote my book I wanted to love someone. I wanted to be in love. Now I know that I shall… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
It is with pain that I read of the dire effects of my book upon the minds of young girls. — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
I read of the Kalamazoo girl who killed herself after reading the book. I am not at all surprised. She lived in… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
Just why I sent it to the publishers would be hard to say, but when I had finished it I felt that… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness. — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things. — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
“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… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman? — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
“It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines” — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
“And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.” — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
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… — Mary MacLane Copy Share Image
