Quotes from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“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, quote from 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, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“She says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“After a while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“...they do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“She answered him, there is nothing within you that fights itself and hitherto you have had the instinct to produce antagonism in others which stimulated you to attack.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself b disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself.”
― Gertrude Stein, quote from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

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Popular quotes

“I’m not sure what I feel. All I know is that I’m tired of being the innocent bystander who gets punched in the gut. It’s their fight—Mom and Dad’s. But how come Heath and I are the ones who end up bruised?” He rearranged one of my braids and wound the loose tail around the tip of his index finger. “Because everything we do in life affects someone else. Buddhists say that inside and outside are basically the same thing. It’s like we’re all trapped together in a small room. If someone pisses in the corner, we all have to worry about it trickling across the floor and getting our shoes wet.”
― Jenn Bennett, quote from The Anatomical Shape of a Heart

“Controlling others—winning—is more compelling than anything (or anyone) else.”
― Martha Stout, quote from The Sociopath Next Door

“As the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present. Slot-machines are based on Skinnerian principles of intermittent reinforcement. The dumb human, like the dumb rat, only needs an occasional payoff to keep pulling the handle. The mind will do the rest.”
― Michael Shermer, quote from Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

“It’s boring.”
“Oh,” I said. I rubbed at my jaw. “You think I should have gone four-color?”
Bob stared at me for a second and said, “I have nightmares about Hell, where all I do is add up numbers and try to have conversations with people like you.”
I glowered up at the skull and nodded. “Okay, fine. You think it needs more drama.”
“More anything. Drama would do. Or breasts.”
I sighed and saw where that line of thought was going. “I am not going to hire a leggy secretary, Bob. Get over it.”
“I didn’t say anything about legs. But as long as we’re on the subject . . .”
― Jim Butcher, quote from Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files

“Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion. The totalitarian tendency of these controls seems to assert itself in still another sense—by spreading to the less developed and even to the pre-industrial areas of the world, and by creating similarities in the development of capitalism and communism.”
― Herbert Marcuse, quote from One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.