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.”