QQOTD: Gertrude Stein
“Affectations
can be dangerous.”
Stein was an American novelist, poet,
playwright, and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh
and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903,
and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon,
where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo
Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair
Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood
Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of
her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas, written in the voice of Alice
B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary
bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature
scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works
have become widely known: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,”and
“There is no there there,” with the
latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home of Oakland.