Quote

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

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Mary MacLane
Age: 48 †
Born: 1881
Born: May 1
Died: 1929
Died: August 6
Film Actor
Historian
Memoirist
Writer
Winnipeg
Manitoba
Good
Creatures
Burns
Like
Genius
Sympathetic
Fire
Virtuous
Feeling
Creature
Feelings
Generous
Everything
Intense
Feel
Passionate
Feels
Merely

More quotes by Mary MacLane

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People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.
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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.
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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.
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I am lithe, but fragile from constant involuntary self-analysis.
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I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.
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Well, if I am not vulgar, neither is my book. I wrote myself. Suggestiveness is always vulgar. But truth never. My book is not even remotely suggestive. I call things by their names. That is all.
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There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.
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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.
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Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.
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A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius.
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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.
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Some day the Devil will come to me and say: 'Come with me.'And I will answer: 'Yes.
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Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.
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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.
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Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?
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I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.
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Except two breeds - the stupid and the narrowly feline - all women have a touch of the Lesbian: an assertion all good non-analytic creatures refute with horror, but quite true: there is always the poignant intensive personal taste, the flair of inner-sex, in the tenderest friendships of women.
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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.
Mary MacLane
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However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell.
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I want to live quietly.
Mary MacLane