Tender Buttons: Objects—food—rooms
1914
Tender Buttons is Gertrude Stein's radical experiment in making language itself strange. Written in 1914, it consists of short, hypnotic prose poems divided into three sections that examine ordinary things: a carafe, a cushion, an egg, an orange, a room. But these are not descriptions. Stein dismantles the familiar vocabulary we use to navigate daily life and rebuilds it into something that feels both alien and deeply intimate. A carafe becomes 'a blind glass.' An orange is 'a plate of manner.' The words should sound like nonsense, but somehow they don't. They land differently, making you see the thing you've never truly seen, even though you've looked at it a thousand times. Stein called her method 'realist', she wanted to capture how the mind actually perceives, not how dictionaries say we should name. The result is sometimes called 'verbal Cubism,' and it's as disorienting and dazzling as Picasso. Tender Buttons asks a simple, unsettling question: what if the words we've always used for the world were wrong?
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“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.””
— Gertrude Stein
“A FEATHER.A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.””
— Gertrude Stein
“Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.””
— Gertrude Stein
“A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.””
— Gertrude Stein
“Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet””
— Gertrude Stein
“A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.””
— Gertrude Stein
“A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot. - Red roses.””
— Gertrude Stein
“What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. - A substance in a cushion””
— Gertrude Stein
“A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.””
— Gertrude Stein
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Tender Buttons: Objects—food—rooms by Gertrude Stein free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Tender Buttons: Objects—food—rooms by Gertrude Stein free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958Cite this book
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Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects—food—rooms. Lex, lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958.Stein, G. (1914). Tender Buttons: Objects—food—rooms. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects—food—rooms. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/tender-buttons-objects-food-rooms-91ee4cd0-1b66-409b-9258-6ea076e0c958.
