Mary MacLane
Mary MacLane
Mary MacLanewas a controversial Canadian-born American writer whose frank memoirs helped usher in the confessional style of autobiographical writing. MacLane was known as the "Wild Woman of Butte"...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionWriter
CountryCanada
world succeed literature
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that - to make the world see your thoughts as you see them.
essence personality vapor
But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.
want quiet
I want to live quietly.
twelve genius
I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.
genius doe expected
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.
want born
I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be.
adventure done murder
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.
children men thinking
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. . . . May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.
beautiful brilliant fame
Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.
want fame i-can
I want fame more than I can tell. But more than I want fame I want happiness.
lines walt
I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.
play adore i-like-him
I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.
strong-women taken heart
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.
taken years three
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.