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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

...they do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it.

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.

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.

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.