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Quotes by Marguerite Young

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
– Marguerite Young
A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.
– Marguerite Young
All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.
– Marguerite Young
All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
– Marguerite Young
All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.
– Marguerite Young
At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
– Marguerite Young
At the University of Chicago I majored in epic literature of the world and studied the material that Eliot had studied. I studied Dante, Milton, Lucretius, Locke, Fourier, Darwin, Owen, and many others. I did not need to go to Eliot. I love Eliot's work, don't get me wrong, but I resent people who say I echo Eliot.
– Marguerite Young
Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.
– Marguerite Young
I always believed that many great writers were women-Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Christina Stead, Katherine Mansfield, Anna Kavan, Jane Bowles.
– Marguerite Young
I bear a heavy gift.
– Marguerite Young
I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.
– Marguerite Young
I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.
– Marguerite Young
I had a book, which was stolen, the art of the life of the character, in which you present a whole life in three of four pages. I used that method.
– Marguerite Young
I had read the histories of mountain climbers, of suffragette captains, of travelers to the Middle East... .all the ladies who went to the Middle East. I'd like to go myself. I didn't invent anything in my book. I didn't need to.
– Marguerite Young
I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.
– Marguerite Young
I like Gertrude Stein, and spent two weeks with her at the University of Chicago.
– Marguerite Young
I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.
– Marguerite Young
I never really attempted to commit suicide. I used to think about committing suicide when I was about 18. I had it worked out that I would do it in multiple ways, all at once. It would take place in a treehouse overlooking the river: I would put a rope around my neck, take poison, shoot myself, and fall into the river all at once.
– Marguerite Young
I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
– Marguerite Young
I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition.
– Marguerite Young
I studied with Robert Morss Lovett, the great professor of epic literature. Another important influence was Ronald S. Crane, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Chicago.
– Marguerite Young
I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.
– Marguerite Young
I think that the style is the writing, a beautiful sense of style. And if you don't have it, it doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't really make any difference. I'm not speaking of realistic novels now, but of the pseudo-poetic novel or short story.
– Marguerite Young
I think the category between fiction and non-fiction is nothing. The poetry of non-fiction is as fabulous as any poetry you could ever write in fiction. Poets have greatly influenced me. The only difference between the novel as poem and the lyric as poem is the difference in length.
– Marguerite Young
I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
– Marguerite Young
I was not influenced by Joyce although he's a great writer, and I love his work. I was influenced by Saint Augustine.
– Marguerite Young
I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
– Marguerite Young
I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.
– Marguerite Young
I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.
– Marguerite Young
I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
– Marguerite Young
I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
– Marguerite Young
I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.
– Marguerite Young
If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.
– Marguerite Young
If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.
– Marguerite Young
If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin.
– Marguerite Young
If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss.
– Marguerite Young
Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?
– Marguerite Young
It's the thing I never could write, the idea of identity and passage of the soul.
– Marguerite Young
Just as I do not want my students to imitate my style, I admire authors who write differently from me. Lewis and Dreiser didn't try to write in a poetic style.
– Marguerite Young
Life has no beginning, middle or end.
– Marguerite Young
Like Kay Boyle, whose work I'm wild about, I could have married, written a book with every baby, a baby with every book.
– Marguerite Young
My first attempt to write about Robert Owen was in the form of poetry. Then I turned it into a blank verse poem, but I discovered that I couldn't fit in all the facts, which are fabulous. I decided to rewrite it a third time, still retaining every image I had already written in the first two versions.
– Marguerite Young
Of the contemporaries, I read Toni Morrison's work and the short stories of Cynthia Ozick. I believe that Ozick, like me, has been influenced by William James... I admire T. S. Eliot, though he did not influence me as people like to think.
– Marguerite Young
One day I bumped into a group of coal miners from the Ozarks, wandering coal miners living a gypsy life... I started to speak with these coal miners, and became very interested in them.
– Marguerite Young
Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.
– Marguerite Young
The asexual angel, neither male nor female... unable to live without her mask of illusions... showed herself to be the denuded character every person would be if confronted with the loss of their illusions as she was.
– Marguerite Young
The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.
– Marguerite Young
The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.
– Marguerite Young
There are many writers I admire, Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo. I was devoted to W.H. Auden. I loved Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. I love James Merrill's poems and his short novels. Ambrose Bierce. Vachel Lindsay.
– Marguerite Young
There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.
– Marguerite Young
When the dream came into being, I always pursued it.
– Marguerite Young
When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbling of reality and you accept it.
– Marguerite Young