Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary MacLane

There is a kind of swagger in that semicolon: fate on one side, choice on the other. Mary MacLane doesn’t merely confess loneliness; she rewrites it as authorship. “I was born to be alone” is the oldest excuse in the book, the gothic alibi of the misfit. Then she flips it: “but now I want to be.” That turn matters because it converts a wound into a posture, a way of taking control over the very condition that supposedly controls her.

MacLane emerged at the early-20th-century hinge when women’s interior lives were expected to be tasteful, modest, and largely private. Her work did the opposite: it staged the self as spectacle, with the candor of a diary and the ambition of a manifesto. In that context, solitude is not just mood; it’s strategy. To want aloneness is to reject the social bargain offered to women (companionship as duty, marriage as destiny) and to claim a private room of one’s own before that phrase became canon.

The subtext is sharper than mere independence. “Born to be alone” is the voice of someone made solitary by circumstance, by temperament, by a world that has no ready place for her intensity. “Now I want to be” is a preemptive strike against pity and a refusal to be pathologized. She’s naming the stigma, then repossessing it. The line works because it dramatizes a modern psychological pivot: turning a perceived deficiency into identity, and identity into power, even if the power is brittle, even if it’s purchased at a cost.