“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.)
“It is a very queer thing this not agreeing with any one. It would seem that where we are each of us always telling and repeating and explaining and doing it again and again that some one would really understand what the other one is always repeating. But in loving, in working, in everything it is always the same thing. In loving some one is jealous, really jealous and it would seem an impossible thing to the one not understanding that the other one could have about such a thing a jealous feeling and they have it and they suffer and they weep and sorrow in it and the other one cannot believe it, they cannot believe the other on can really mean it and sometime the other one perhaps comes to realise it that the other one can really suffer in it and then later that one tries to reassure the other one the one that is then suffering about that thing and the other one the one that is receiving such reassuring says then, did you think I ever could believe this thing, no I have no fear of such a thing, and I’d is all puzzling, to have one kind of feeling, a jealous feeling, and not have a fear in them that the other one does not want them, it is a very mixing this and over and over again when you are certain it is a whole one some one, one must begin again and again and the only thing that is a help to one is that there is really so little fundamental changing in any one and always every one is repeating big pieces of them and so sometimes perhaps some one will know something and I certainly would like very much to be that one and so now to begin.”
(Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans, p. 305 in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten.)
“261. Letter. A letter is an unannounced visit; the mailman, the mediator of impolite incursions. One ought to have one hour in every eight days for receiving letters, and then take a bath.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, trans. Walter Kaufmann.)
“Q: What do you consider the most important tool of the genius of today?”
A: Rubber cement.”
(Donald Barthelme, “The Genius”, p. 26 in Sadness.)