I, Mary MacLane Quotes

“I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting…”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“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.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“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 it would take away my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one, three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body when it is in its coffin.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“And it is in New York I have those strangest things of all: human friendships. Not many friendships and not of spent familiarities: for I don't like actual human beings too much around me. But yet friendships made of the edges of thoughts and vivid pathos and pregnant odds and ends of nervous human flesh and fire.

It is in New York I go to the apartment of a Friend at the end of an afternoon. In the apartment are some persons having tea, men and women. The Friend greets me at the door. She wears maybe a dress of thin dark and light silk, shaped in the quaint outlandish fashion of the hour. And she has shrewd kindly eyes like a Rembrandt portrait, and a worn New-York-ish Latin-ish brain and heart both of which are made of steel, sparkle and the very plain red meat of living. She says, 'Hello-Mary-Mac-Lane,' and clasps my hand, and we exchange a glance of no real understanding at all but suggesting warmed challenge of personality, and an oblique sweet call of depth to depth, and of friendship which by mere force of preference and of our separate quality and calibre is true rather than false. So close and no closer may friendship be. And friendship with-all, is closer than any love. It is the closest human beings ever come to meeting.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.”
― Mary Maclane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“…the neurotic torture of being seductive regularly—by the night: the more that perchance the struggle always is unconscious.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“…some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the pungent appetizing charm of their villains.”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

“It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature—like gold teeth and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines”
― Mary MacLane, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days