“Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of the inner and outer reality. She has reproduced simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should never be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry and prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.”

— Gertrude Stein , book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), p. 259

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American art collector and experimental writer of novels, p… 1874–1946

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