Life & Wisdom Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein draws a hard line with the kind of severity that doubles as a dare. “Remarks are not literature” reads like a scolding aimed at the salon, the lecture hall, the review column - any place where cleverness gets mistaken for art. She’s policing the border between language that merely comments and language that actually performs. A remark is reactive, parasitic: it lives off something else. Literature, in Stein’s sense, has to generate its own weather.

The intent is partly defensive and partly revolutionary. Stein spent her career being treated as an oddity, then an idea, then a punchline - discussed more than read. The line rejects the whole apparatus of secondhand significance: the tasteful summary, the tidy interpretation, the gossip of “what it’s about.” If you’ve ever felt how her sentences insist on being experienced rather than translated, this is the manifesto version of that feeling.

The subtext is also a jab at culture’s addiction to opinion. Remarks are quick, portable, socially rewarding. They travel well in conversation; they flatter the speaker. Literature is slower and less compliant. It asks you to stay inside a text long enough for meaning to stop behaving.

Context matters: Stein is a modernist who watched language get industrialized - by newspapers, slogans, and the emerging celebrity economy. Her work pushes against that flattening with repetition, estrangement, and refusal. So the line isn’t anti-criticism; it’s anti-substitution. Don’t confuse talking around art with making it. And don’t confuse being quotable with being written.