I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

Taken at face value, the remark is a deliberately provocative assertion of intellectual self-reliance and dissatisfaction with the cultural limitations of her milieu. It suggests a speaker who has surveyed the leading minds available to her—“all the people worth knowing”—and still feels unmatched, implying both confidence and isolation. In Fuller’s case, the line is often cited to capture her reputation for formidable intellect and impatience with complacent literary society. Read less literally, it can also be heard as a critique of America’s thin intellectual infrastructure in her day: the problem is not merely personal vanity, but the scarcity of peers and institutions capable of sustaining the kind of rigorous conversation she sought.