Life & Wisdom Quote by Marguerite Young

There is a bracing refusal in Marguerite Young's line: not of gender exactly, but of the demand that gender be the primary plot. "I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man" lands less as manifesto than as a private accounting of attention. She is telling you where her consciousness goes when it’s left alone: toward sentences, toward vocation, toward whatever internal engine makes a person keep writing even when it costs them.

The pivot is the sly, almost Biblical phrasing of origin and fate: "born to a writer" and "doomed to be a writer". Young frames authorship as inheritance and curse at once. "Born to" evokes lineage, a household where language was oxygen and expectation. "Doomed" undercuts any romantic "calling" narrative; it suggests compulsion, a life narrowed by necessity. The subtext is that writing isn’t an accessory to identity but the identity that annexes everything else.

In the context of a 20th-century literary culture that persistently filed women writers under "women's writing" (as if their work were a sidebar to the main shelf), Young’s stance reads like strategy as much as self-description. She isn’t denying gendered experience; she’s rejecting its editorial packaging. The rhetoric performs what it argues: it strips labels down to a single, stubborn noun - writer - and dares you to treat that as the whole story, even if it’s the least comfortable one.