Quotes from book
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Name: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Author: Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a 1933 book by Gertrude Stein, written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. In 1998, Modern Library ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century.

“She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.”

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.”

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

“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