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.

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.

I have never read a line of Walt Whitman.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm.

People say of me, 'She's peculiar.' They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.

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.

There is really no right and wrong. I recognize no right and wrong.