"I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words that they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different."

--From The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein, 1935