Stein Gertrude Quotes & Sayings

Anyone who marries three girls from St Louis hasn't learned much. — Gertrude Stein

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening. — Gertrude Stein

Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it. — Gertrude Stein

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

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything. — 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

Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

Suppose no one asked a question.
What would the answer be? — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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. — 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

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. — Gertrude Stein

I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist. — Harold E. Varmus

It is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding. — Gertrude Stein

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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

Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone. — Gertrude Stein

In tender hearted natures, those that mostly never feel strong passion, suffering often comes to make them harder. When these do not know in themselves what it is to suffer, suffering is then very awful to them and they badly want to help everyone who has to suffer, and they have a deep reverence for anybody who knows really how to always suffer. But when it comes to them to really suffer, they soon begin to lose their fear and tenderness and wonder. Why it isn't so very much to suffer, when even I can bear to do it. It isn't very pleasant to be having all the time, to stand it, but they are not so much wiser after all, all the others just because they know too how to bear it. — Gertrude Stein

Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal. — Gertrude Stein

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken. — Gertrude Stein

Action and reaction are equal and opposite. — Gertrude Stein

It is an extraordinary thing but it is true, wars are only a means of publicising the things already accomplished. — 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

Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time. — Laura Mullen

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

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 they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different. — Gertrude Stein

There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all. — 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

There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There's your answer. — 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

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

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. — Gertrude Stein

You have to learn to do everything, even to die. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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. — 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

You never answer a question nobody does. — Gertrude Stein

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work. — 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

Remarks are not literature. — Gertrude Stein

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

The seam in between is fenceless. — Gertrude Stein

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? — Gertrude Stein

If you can do it, why do it." ~ Gertrude Stein — Gertrude Stein

A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged. — Gertrude Stein

A diary means yes indeed. — Gertrude Stein

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. — Gertrude Stein

Sarah Harrell There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual. — Gertrude Stein

I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it ... — Gertrude Stein

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed. — Gertrude Stein

Let me repeat what history teaches. History teaches. — Gertrude Stein

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

In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein. — Bennett Cerf

You have to know what you want to get it. — Gertrude Stein

What is the answer?
[ I [Alice B Toklas] was silent ]
In that case, what is the question? — Gertrude Stein

They do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

When you get there, there isn't any there there. — Gertrude Stein

The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself, but for a painter to be able to paint, the painting must first of all be done. — Gertrude Stein

Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed. — Gertrude Stein

There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. (Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures) — Gertrude Stein

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business. — Gertrude Stein

The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything. — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

When is there some discharge when. There never is. — Gertrude Stein

Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time. Who makes them. Nobody can make them because nobody can what ever they do see.
All this makes sentences so clear I know how I like them.
What is a sentence mostly what is a sentence. With them a sentence is with us about us all about us we will be willing with what a sentence is. A sentence is that they cannot be carefully there is a doubt about it.
The great question is can you think a sentence. What is a sentence. He thought a sentence. Who calls him to come which he did.
... What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value. — Gertrude Stein

It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night. — 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

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. — 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 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. — Gertrude Stein

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. So then I as a contemporary creating the composition in the beginning was groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike. This then was the period that brings me to the period of the beginning of 1914. Everything being alike everything naturally would be simply different and war came and everything being alike and everything being simply different brings everything being simply different brings it to romanticism. — Gertrude Stein

The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell - unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls — Diana Vreeland

It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened. — Gertrude Stein

A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing. — Gertrude Stein

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 also are creating their own time refuse to accept. — Gertrude Stein

Nature is not natural and that is natural enough. — Gertrude Stein

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

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art. — Jerry Saltz

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. — Gertrude Stein

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

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist. — Gertrude Stein

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

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. — Gertrude Stein

How I wish I were able to say what I think ... — Gertrude Stein

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. — Gertrude Stein

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

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost. — Gertrude Stein

Is money money or isn't money money. Everybody who earns
it and spends it every day in order to live knows
that money is money, anybody who votes it to be
gathered in as taxes knows money is not money. That
is what makes everybody go crazy ... When you earn
money and spend money every day anybody can know the
difference between a million and three. But when you
vote money away there really is not any difference
between a million and three. — Gertrude Stein

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

Replacing a casual aquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son. — Gertrude Stein