“But one does get so tired of seeing everybody planting and growing vegetables you think how nice it will be to have those happy days come back when vegetables grew not in the ground but in tins. A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing but vegetables.”
(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 39.)
“Of course there are a good many times when there is no war just as there are a good many times when there is a war. To be sure when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war. And when there is no war, well just now I cannot remember just how it is when there is no war.”
(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 5.)
“Gertrude Stein proved in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that, when she want to, she can write straightforward English that any average high-school student can understand. Wars I Have Seen, with a few very minor aberrations, is another such book. The first half, in fact, which conveys an impression that the author was more concerned with foraging food for her dogs than with the fate of democracy, struck this publisher as all too comprehensible.”
(Bennett Cerf, front jacket copy for Random House’s 1945 edition of Wars I Have Seen.)
“Once, when there was a choice of being kings or messengers, we, being children, chose to be messengers, arms and legs flying as we romped from castle to castle. We got the messages wrong as like as not, or forgot them, or fell asleep in the forest while kings died of anxiety.”
(Guy Davenport, “The Messengers”, p. 2 in The Cardiff Team.)
“Harnett had to earn his living, in nineteenth-century New York, by painting such trompe-l’œil compositions to decorate public bars, and it appears that he never sold a single picture, in his lifetime, to any of the important American art collectors of his day. He did manage, however, to become a celebrity, for a while, among the Broadway journalists who frequented the bars where his paintings were exhibited. One of these happened to represent a still-life arrangement of various objects that included a dollar-bill which looked as if it could be literally lifted out of the picture and taken away in one’s pocket, so that a legend, probably apocryphal, soon began to circulate about this picture. One newspaper of the period even states that the United States Government sued Harnett for counterfeiting the national currency, but that the artist then won his case in court by pointing out that his dollar-bill was painted on a board too big to fit in a man’s pocket and too thick to be mistakenly accepted in lieu of paper money. I have tried to find records of this strange case in American legal literature, but without any successs.”
(Edouard Roditi, in an interview with Giorgio Morandi, p. 148 in Karen Wilkins’s Giorgio Morandi: works, writings and interviews.)
“Schwob told us further:
‘Baudelaire, in a beer tavern, declared: “There’s a smell of destruction here.” “Why, no,” he was told, “There’s a smell of sauerkraut, and of slightly warm woman.” But Baudelaire repeated with violence: “I tell you it smells of destruction!” ‘ “
(Jules Renard, January 1892, p. 45 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)
“A thought written down is dead. It was alive. It lives no longer. It was a flower. Writing it down has made it artificial, that is to say, immutable.”
(Jules Renard, November 1888, p. 21 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)