Life & Wisdom Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein turns the wholesome fantasy of self-sufficiency into a punchline about expectation, attention, and artistic boredom. A vegetable garden “in the beginning” is pure projection: a neat rectangle of possibility where you can imagine virtue, renewal, maybe even transformation. Then comes the slow sabotage of reality. “Little by little” is the tempo of disenchantment, the way everyday time erodes the glamour we attach to new projects. The payoff is deliciously deadpan: it “grows nothing but vegetables.” Not weeds, not failure - the literal success becomes the problem.

That repetition (“nothing, nothing but vegetables”) is Stein doing what she always does: making language expose its own thin spots. The phrase “nothing but” flips between two meanings at once - “only” and “not much.” The garden produces exactly what it promised, and that exactness is deflating. It’s a joke about the poverty of the literal, about how the mind craves surplus meaning: plot, revelation, metaphor, novelty. Vegetables are nourishment, but they’re also stubbornly unpoetic. They don’t “develop” the way a story does; they just keep being themselves.

Context matters: Stein, the modernist who made repetition an instrument and domestic scenes a laboratory, is poking at the romance of beginnings - the opening of a book, a love affair, an avant-garde movement. The line carries a quiet warning: if you’re chasing the thrill of promise, don’t confuse it with the work of living. The garden will eventually give you what it is. That’s both the joke and the ache.