I Await the Devil's Coming Quotes

“I am not good. I am not virtuous. I am not sympathetic. I am not generous. I am merely and above all a creature of intense passionate feeling. I feel—everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings…”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“If it please the Devil, one day I may have happiness. That will be all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different being.

But meanwhile I shall eat.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'

And I will answer: 'Yes.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood. There will always be a lacking, a wanting -- some dead branches that never grew leaves. It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy. It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing. It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and alone.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“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. There are too many such in the world now.”
― Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane

“It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Had I been born a man I would by now have made a deep impression of myself on the world - on some part of it. But I am a woman, and God, or the Devil, or Fate, or whosoever it was, has flayed me of the thick outer skin and thrown me out into the midst of Life - has left me a lonely damned thing filled with the red, red blood of ambition and desire, but afraid to be touched, for there is no thick skin between my sensitive flesh and the and world s fingers.
But I want to be touched.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen.
When you are nineteen there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“And always while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there’s a treachery in it.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought, - and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And
when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.
But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said, - I will know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was even more lonely; and everything was still harder to understand.
And again I said - faintly - everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed
to think how stupid I have been - and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.
For I know that it will not be different.
I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature -- something not of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements, where every little door is closed -- every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's-soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's-body is laid in its grave.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“It is the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“ People are abominable creatures. There is nothing in the world that can become so maddeningly wearisome as people, people, people!”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“To be a woman, young and all alone, is hard - hard! - is to want things, is to carry a heavy, heavy weight.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“I bite the olive again. Again the bitter salt crisp ravishes my tongue. "If this is vanity, vanity let it be." The golden moments flit by and I heed them not. For am I not comfortably seated and eating an olive! Go hang yourself, you who have never been comfortably seated and eating an olive!”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs 'limbs'; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“When I think of the exquisite love and sympathy which might be between a mother and daughter, I feel myself defrauded of a beautiful thing rightfully mine, in a world where for me such things are pitiably few.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen, there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me. And always, while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there's a treachery in it.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“Here is the End for me, if I want it — here is the Ceasing, when I want it.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming

“The kisses of the gastric juice become hot and sensual and convulsive and ecstatic.”
― Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane

“I wish to leave all my obscurity, my misery—my weary unhappiness—behind me forever. I am deadly, deadly tired of my unhappiness.”
― Mary MacLane, I Await the Devil's Coming