Gertrude Stein Quotes

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient. ~ Gertrude Stein

He [Picasso] used to say quite often, paper lasts quite as well as paint and after all it all ages together, why not, and he said further, after all, later, no one will see the picture, they will see the legend of the picture, the legend that the picture has created, then it makes no difference if the picture lasts or does not last. ~ Gertrude Stein

ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks. ~ Frederick Buechner

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write. ~ 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

There are people out there who get annoyed at the story that Djuna barnes, rather than identify as a lesbian, preferred to say that she 'just loved Thelma.' Gertrude Stein reputedly made similar claims, albeit not in those exact terms, about Alice. I get why it's politically maddening, but I've also always thought it a little romantic - the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one. ~ Maggie Nelson

Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens. ~ Gertrude Stein

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal. ~ Gertrude Stein

Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat. ~ Gertrude Stein

There is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be. ~ Gertrude Stein

I think the reason I am important is that I know everything. ~ Gertrude Stein

One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. ~ Gertrude Stein

Near a war is always not very near. ~ Gertrude Stein

At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you. ~ Gertrude Stein

The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it. ~ Gertrude Stein

There is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter. ~ Gertrude Stein

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away. ~ Gertrude Stein

The English language has been thrust upon Americans. And it is wrong. As static and immobile as are the English, just so ever-moving are Americans. Here is a huge country. Not a mere island. Naturally people move. And they need a moving language. A language that can interpret American life. Nouns and adjectives won't express American life. They are too weak, too immobile. But verbs, adverbs, prepositions and the like, ah, they are moving, just as Americans. Obviously we cannot suddenly junk the English language and adopt some other tongue. English is too connotative, too close to us. Our problem is to adapt the English language to American needs. To make it move with us Americans. That is the problem
to write things as they are, not as they seem. our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory. ~ Gertrude Stein

We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs. ~ Gertrude Stein

Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world ... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street ... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial. ~ Gertrude Stein

I wish to remain to remember that stanzas go on ~ Gertrude Stein

Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics. ~ Gertrude Stein

I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. ~ Gertrude Stein

The composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented. ~ Gertrude Stein

If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out. ~ Gertrude Stein

Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer ~ Gertrude Stein

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation. ~ Gertrude Stein

In America, everybody is, but some are more than others. ~ Gertrude Stein

It seems all "protection" has to be monitored, considered, weighed and justified - I am suggesting we do that (but it's something Mary Shelley (and Gertrude Stein) also suggest). "Torch Song," the book's final section, looks at an arson committed by someone hired to protect the wilderness from fires, a catastrophic failure of protection! ~ Laura Mullen

Anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just 'talents.' Hemingway later invented his own form also. The criterion for judging talent or genius is ephemeral, speaking rationally in this world of graphs, but one gets the feeling definitely when a writer of genius amazes him by strokes of force never seen before and yet hauntingly familiar. ~ Jack Kerouac

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. ~ Gertrude Stein

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking. ~ Gertrude Stein

A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war. ~ Gertrude Stein

August is a month when if it is hot weather it is really very hot. ~ Gertrude Stein

Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything. ~ Gertrude Stein

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. ~ Gertrude Stein

Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life ~ Gertrude Stein

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation. ~ Gertrude Stein

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame. ~ Gertrude Stein

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death. ~ Gertrude Stein

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting. ~ Gertrude Stein

One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion. ~ Gertrude Stein

If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me. ~ Gertrude Stein

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure? ~ Gertrude Stein

And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. ~ Gertrude Stein

She answered him, there is nothing within you that fights itself and hitherto you have had the instinct to produce antagonism in others which stimulated you to attack. ~ Gertrude Stein

When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking. ~ Gertrude Stein

What good are roots if you can't take them with you ~ Gertrude Stein

There was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war. ~ Gertrude Stein

What happened to-day, a narrative ~ Gertrude Stein

Adventure is making the distant approach nearer
but romance is having what is where it is which is not
where you are stay where it is. ~ Gertrude Stein

I'll always be Alice Toklas if you'll be Gertrude Stein. ~ Gertrude Stein

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything. ~ Gertrude Stein

I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free. ~ Gertrude Stein

Affectations can be dangerous. ~ Gertrude Stein

Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime. ~ Gertrude Stein

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting. ~ Gertrude Stein

It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny. ~ Gertrude Stein

"Native" always means people who belong someplace else, because they had once belonged somewhere. That shows that the white race does not really think they belong anywhere, because they think of everybody else as native. ~ Gertrude Stein

Anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything. ~ Gertrude Stein

I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.' Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife.
'I am nothing,' Alice said after Gertrude dies, 'but a memory of her.'
... the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again ... ~ Lauren Groff

Nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen. ~ Gertrude Stein

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. ~ Gertrude Stein

I had always been so much taken with the way all English people I knew always were going to see their lawyer. Even if they have no income and do not earn anything they always have a lawyer. ~ Gertrude Stein

I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany. ~ Gertrude Stein

Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living. ~ Gertrude Stein

The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid. ~ Gertrude Stein

They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story. ~ Gertrude Stein

A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
(on Ezra Pound) ~ Gertrude Stein

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood. ~ Gertrude Stein

When there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war. ~ Gertrude Stein

The funny part of it all is that relatively few people seem to go crazy, relatively few even a little crazy or even a little weird, relatively few, and those few because they have nothing to do that is to say they have nothing to do or they do not do anything that has anything to do with the war only with food and cold and little things like that. ~ Gertrude Stein

How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it. ~ Gertrude Stein

I am I because my little dog knows me. ~ 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

When moneys in a purse in my own pocket / It means wealth ... ~ Gertrude Stein

I have lived half of my life in Paris, not the half the made me but the half in which I made what I made. ~ Gertrude Stein

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting. ~ Gertrude Stein

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. 'Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last, 'Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree. ~ Gertrude Stein

It is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated. ~ Gertrude Stein

The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no
opinion about things I don't understand. ~ Gertrude Stein

The way to resume is to resume.
If we knew everything ahead of time, all would be dictation not creation. ~ Gertrude Stein

America is my country, and Paris is my home town. ~ Gertrude Stein

College professors have two bad traits. They are logical
and they are easily flattered. ~ Gertrude Stein

If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous. ~ Gertrude Stein

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure. ~ Gertrude Stein

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before, ~ Gertrude Stein

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything. ~ Gertrude Stein

More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale. ~ Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein maintained that one wrote for oneself and for strangers, a superb recognition that I would extend into a parallel apothegm: one reads for oneself and for strangers. The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One of the ineluctable stigmata of the canonical is aesthetic dignity, which is not to be hired. ~ Harold Bloom

Romance is everything. ~ Gertrude Stein

I like familiarity. In me it does not bring contempt-only more familiarity. ~ Gertrude Stein

The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time. ~ Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost. ~ Dorothy Parker

Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell ... all about themselves. ~ Gertrude Stein

A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation. ~ Gertrude Stein

I have been the creative literary mind of the century. ~ Gertrude Stein

Our little ford was almost ready. She was later to be called Auntie after Gertrude Stein's aunt Pauline who always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was properly flattered. ~ Gertrude Stein

Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening. ~ Gertrude Stein

Dogs are dogs, you sometimes think that they are not but they are. And they always are here there and everywhere. ~ Gertrude Stein