at this point I meet Me face to face. I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and dearly and damnably important to Me.

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.

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.

I was born to be alone, and I always shall be but now I want to be.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.

Fame is indeed beautiful and benign and gentle and satisfying, but happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.