“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.)

“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.)

“This makes them wish and afterwards this makes them leave and afterwards this makes them leave and wish and this makes them leave and leaves and wish and afterward, this makes them wish and leave and leaves and afterward.”

(Gertrude Stein, A Novel of Thank You, p. 3.)

“He came early in the morning.
He thought they needed comfort
Which they did
And he gave them an assurance
That it would be all as well
As indeed were it
Not to have it needed at any time”

(Gertrude Stein, from Stanzas in Meditation, quoted in John Ashbery’s “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,” p. 12 in his Selected Prose.)

“I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war. His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service. He was very depressed and he went to America. Everybody loved him. So much so that it was a joke in Paris that when any american arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel. Once Gertrude Stein went to see Braque, just after the war, and going into the studio in which there happened just then to be three young americans, she said to Braque, and how is Marcelle. The three young americans came up to her breathlessly and said, have you seen Marcel. She laughed, and having become accustomed to the inevitableness of the american belief that there was only one Marcel, she explained that Braque’s wife was named Marcelle and it was Marcelle Braque about whom she was enquiring.”

(Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, p. 795)

“CABANNE: So it’s your moral position, more than your work, which was irritating?

DUCHAMP: There again, I had no position. I’ve been a little like Gertrude Stein. To a certain group, she was considered an interesting writer, with very original things . . .

CABANNE It’s a form of comparison between people of that period. By that, I mean that there are people in every period who aren’t ‘in.’ No one’s bothered by it. Whether I had been in or not, it would have been all the same. It’s only now, forty years later, that we discover things had happened forty years before that might have bothered some people – but they couldn’t have cared less then!”

(Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett, p. 17)