Gertrude Stein (quotes)

Romance is everything.
There is no there there.
A diary means yes indeed.
One must dare to be happy.
This joy you feel is life.
Remarks aren’t literature.
art is the pulse of a nation.
I wish that I was where I am.
It is very easy to love alone.
You are all a lost generation.
Affectations can be dangerous.
Too few is as many as too many.
If you can do it then why do it?
We are always the same age inside.
Patriarchal Poetry makes mistakes.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Near a war is always not very near.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Any time is the time to make a poem.
Argument is to me the air I breathe.
Forensics is eloquence and reduction.
You attract what you need like a lover
I am I because my little dog knows me.
Forget grammar and think about potatoes
You never answer a question nobody does.
You have to know what you want to get it.
Every man is the maker of his own fortune
History takes time. History makes memory.
Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.
It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.
Silent gratitude isn’t very much to anyone.
A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is.
Nothing has happened today except kindness.
How I wish I were able to say what I think.
Action and reaction are equal and opposite.
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.
it is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding.
Money is always there but the pockets change.
How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.
There are a lot of other things besides nouns.
America is my country and Paris is my hometown.
This is the place of places and and it is here.
When in a museum, walk slowly but keep walking.
When you get there, there isn’t any there there.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
You have to learn to do everything, even to die.
I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.
Art isn’t everything. It’s just about everything.
The artist works by locating the world in himself
Two things are always the same the dance and war.
Nature is not natural and that is natural enough.
There is no such thing as being good to your wife.
Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.
This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.
Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.
Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.
Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.
I have been the creative literary mind of the century.
What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
It is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated.
A masterpiece… may be unwelcome but it is never dull.
I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.
In America, everybody is, but some are more than others.
The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
I’ll always be Alice Toklas if you’ll be Gertrude Stein.
Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.
Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
Very likely education does not make very much difference.
If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.
Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.
When moneys in a purse in my own pocket / It means wealth.
As there was never any question there was never any answer.
If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.
Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.
There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.
I think the reason I am important is that I know everything.
What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.
Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.
Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?
Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.
In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.
The way to resume is to resume. It is the only way. To resume.
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
Whoever said money can’t buy happiness didn’t know where to shop
Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.
From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional.
Don’t write about what you don’t know even if you don’t know it.
In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.
Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn’t learned much.
But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.
It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
August is a month when if it is hot weather it is really very hot.
It is a difficult thing to like anybody else’s ideas of being funny.
It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
each generation has something different at which they are all looking.
If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.
French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.
Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
I really do know that it can be done and if it can be done why do it…
What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.
Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.
There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
Literature – creative literature – unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous
I like familiarity. In me it does not bring contempt-only more familiarity.
You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.
I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.
Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
Once upon a time the world was round, and you could go on it around and around.
Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.
Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.
I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it.
Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.
There is no beginning to an end / But there is a beginning and an end / To beginning.
I was somewhat drunk with what I had done. And I am always one to prefer being sober.
The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.
I have heard Will Honeycomb say, A Woman seldom Writes her Mind but in her Postscript.
How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.
there is art and there is official art, there always has been and there always will be.
Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat.
College professors have two bad traits. They are logical and they are easily flattered.
All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.
Governing is occupying but not interesting, governments are occupying but not interesting.
Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.
I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.
If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.
There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.
It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.
[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet
The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.
Mostly every one is needing some one to be one listening to that one being one being one boasting.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don’t dance So you might as well dance.
A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.
Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.
One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.
There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.
The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting.
The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
There ain’t no answer. There ain’t gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.
The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.
Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.
I was undone by my Auxiliary; when I had once called him in, I could not subsist without Dependance on him.
A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover. A at most. Saint saint a saint.
If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.
When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.
Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the Reality and interested in telling about it.
Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.
Dogs are dogs, you sometimes think that they are not but they are. And they always are here there and everywhere.
It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.
There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.
I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing
A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.
One never discusses anything with anybody who can understand one discusses things with people who cannot understand.
Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.
Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.
Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
Well money is not easy to describe. It is easy to lose but it cannot be lost, and no one can get really get used to it.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Animals in different countries have different expressions just as the people in different countries differ in expression.
That is what you are. That’s what you all are…All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.
I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
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.
A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.
there is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.
The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.
You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.
She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.
I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.
Men … are so conservative, so selfish, so boresome, and … they are so ugly, and … they are gullible, anybody can convince them.
Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.
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.
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.
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.
When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.
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.
I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.
It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.
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.
To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.
there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.
Some out of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a nuisance to them, a terror perhaps to them, a difficult thing to be forgetting.
It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.
A country house is not the same as a house in a country and a hotel in the country is not the same as a hotel in a town but is it in a small town.
I had a family. They can be a nuisance in identity but there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do without.
I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.
What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.
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.
There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning.
The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.
The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.
You’ll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?’
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
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.
A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
When you earn it and spend it you do know the difference between three dollars and a million dollars, but when you say it and vote it, it all sounds the same.
If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.
To know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing.
you are brilliant and subtle if you come from Iowa and really strange and you live as you live and you are always very well taken care of if you come from Iowa.
More and more I am certain that the only difference between man and animals is that men can count and animals cannot and if they count they mostly do count money.
Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.
. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
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.
When I said. A rose is a rose is a rose. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.
I manage to think twice about everything / Why will they like me as they do / Or not as they do / Why will they praise me as they do / Or praise me not not as they do.
Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.
The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.
I could never be one of two I could never be two in one as married couples do and can, I am but one all one, one and all one, and so I have never been married to any one.
There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.
It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.
If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.
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.
That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.
The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.
In America … who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.
You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.
In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.
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.
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.
… 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.
What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.
I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I’ve got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.
I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.
it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
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.
I don’t envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.
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.
One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows…. Knowledge is the thing you know and how can you know more than you do know.
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.
This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.
Superstition is believing that something means anything and that anything means something and that each thing means a particular thing and will mean a particular thing is coming. Oh yes it does.
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.
I like loving. I like mostly all the ways one can have of having loving feelings in them. Slowly it has come to be in me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.
I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.
If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.
Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.
War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.
The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.
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.
“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.
Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realising everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.
Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is nopossible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.
The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.
The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.
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.
If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything.
More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.
You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don’t hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.
Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.
I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.
I often think how celebrated I am. / It is difficult not to think how celebrated I am. / And if I think how celebrated I am / They know who know that I am new / That is I knew I know how celebrated I am / And after all it astonishes even me.
An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.
From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.
It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.
it is all the question of identity. … As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside.
It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.
… 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.
There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.
Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
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.
It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.
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.
It is very funny about money. The thing that differentiates man from animals is money. All animals have the same emotions and the same ways as men. Anybody who has lots of animals around knows that. But the thing no animal can do is count, and the thing no animal can know is money.
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
One thing is certain the only thing that makes you younger or older is that nothing can happen that is different from what you expected and when that happens and it mostly does happen everything is different from what you expected then there is no difference between being younger or older.
There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs…. The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one’s own particular climate. If it were one’s last penny it would be used for that return passage.
Family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering this thing are remembering that family living living can go on existing. Very many are quite certain that family living can go on existing. Very many are remembering that they are quite certain that family living can go on existing.
… 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.
Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.
there are many ways of eating, for some eating is living for some eating is dying, for some thinking about ways of eating gives to them the feeling that they have it in them to be alive and to be going on living, to some to think about eating makes them know that death is always waiting that dying is in them.
No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight.
To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.
You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting… It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.
The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.
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.
It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work. And after all there is no sense in it because if it were not for my work they would not be interested in me so why should they not be more interested in my work than in me. That is one of the things one has to worry about in America.
It gave me a great notion of the credit of our present government and administration, to find people press as eagerly to pay moneyas they would to receive it; and, at the same time, a due respect for that body of men who have found out so pleasing an expedient for carrying on the common cause, that they have turned a tax into a diversion.
Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It’s a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup.
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
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.
There is something in this native land business and you cannot get away from it, in peace time you do not seem to notice it much particularly when you live in foreign parts but when there is a war and you are all alone and completely cut off from knowing about your country well then there it is, your native land is your native land, it certainly is.
The one thing that everybody wants is to be freenot to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free ‚Ä¶ The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.
It is very difficult in quarreling to be certain in either one what the other one is remembering. It is very often astonishing to each one quarreling to find out what the other one was remembering for quarreling. Mostly in quarreling not any one is finding out what the other one is remembering for quarreling, what the other one is remembering from quarreling.
… 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.
Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village…. I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?
No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.
Some men and women are inquisitive about everything, they are always asking, if they see any one with anything they ask what is that thing, what is it you are carrying, what are you going to be doing with that thing, why have you that thing, where did you get that thing, how long will you have that thing, there are very many men and women who want to know about anything about everything.
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.
Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.
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.
A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.
But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses t√™tes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses t√™tes but now we know that there will be other grosses t√™tes and the will be all the same.
it is a surprising thing that the largest city in the world should have a population as gentle and pleasant and intimate and considerate and comforting as a little bit of a place where everybody knows everybody and everything, but astonishing or not it is perfectly true and the inhabitants of New York are just like that, and they are like that and this thing is a delightful, natural and gentle and sweet and comforting thing.
We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why do they not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.
Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen was something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting. One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.
A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.
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.
Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.
There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Everybody now-a-days is a father, there is father Mussolini and father Hitler and father Roosevelt and father Stalin and father Trotsky and father Blum and father Franco is just commencing now and there are ever so many more ready to be one. Fathers are depressing. England is the only country now that has not got one and so they are more cheerful there than anywhere. It is a long time now that they have not had any fathering and so their cheerfulness is increasing.

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About Gertrude Stein

Quotes by Gertrude Stein