I was born to be alone, and I always shall be; but now I want to be.
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.
The world is like a little marsh filled with mint and white hawthorn.
You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.
Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.
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.
I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.
There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.
I want to live quietly.
My intention to lecture is as vague as my intention is to go on the stage. I will never consider an offer to lecture, not because I despise the vocation, but because I have no desire to appear on the public rostrum.
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.
Of poets I put Virgil first - he was greatest.
One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep.
I've never made plans for more than a day ahead.
The only joy I had was writing what was. That book was. It no longer amuses me to be all the things I was when I wrote that. But it is my story as I was then.
I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day.
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.
Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.
I do not see any beauty in self-restraint.
I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.
