Gertrude Stein

You don’t realise the important fact that virtue and vice have it in common that they are vulgar when not passionately given. You think that they carry within them a different power. Yes they do because they have different world-values, but as for their relation to vulgarity, it is as true of vice as of virtue that you can’t sell what should be passionately given without forcing yourself into many acts of vulgarity and the chances are that in endeavoring to escape the vulgarity of virtue, you will find yourselves engulfed in the vulgarity of vice. Good gracious! here I am at it again. I never seem to know how to keep still, but you both know already that I have the failing of my tribe. I believe in the sacred rites of conversation even when it is a monologue.”

. I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid

. I have a sort of notion that to be capable of anything more worth while one must have the power of idealising another and I don’t seem to have any of that.”

evening lying there in the darkness yielding to a suggestion rather than to an impulse Adele pressed the fluttering fingers to her lips.

tell me will we be friends?” Adele took it very thoughtfully. “One usually knows very definitely when there is no chance of an acquaintance becoming a friendship but on the other hand it is impossible to tell in a given case whether there is. I really don’t know,” she said. Helen answered her with fervor. “I honor you for being honest.”

they lay there agreeing and disagreeing in endless discussion with an intensity of interest that long familiarity had in no way diminished, varied by indulgence in elaborate foolishness and reminiscent jokes, she enjoyed to the full the sense of family friendship

THERE IS NO PASSION more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs

Much as I wanted you I was not eager for after all you meant to me a turgid and complex world, difficult yet necessary to understand and for the moment I wanted to escape all that, I longed only for obvious, superficial, clean simplicity.”

Adele found herself constantly forced on by Helen’s pain. She went farther than she could in honesty because she was unable to refuse anything to one who had given all. It was a false position. All reactions had now to be concealed as it was evident that Helen could no longer support that struggle. Their old openness was no longer possible and Adele ceased to express herself freely.

I wonder,” she said, “why I am doomed always to care for people who are so hopelessly inadequate.”