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"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."
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Exlpore more Desire quotes

"Politeness is a desire to be treated politely, and to be esteemed polite oneself."

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."

"The greatest part of intimate confidences proceed from a desire either to be pitied or admired."

"Without 'Gnan' (True Knowledge of the Self), desire(s) will not go away."

"You need to be greedy or ignorant to truly want to live forever."

"Nothing prevents one from appearing natural as the desire to appear natural."

"Duty - that which sternly impels us in the direction of profit, along the line of desire."

"He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato."

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."
Explore more quotes by Mary MacLane

"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 book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"One must always say things that aim to interest, because in the world one must after all pay for one's keep."

"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."
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