Gertrude Stein > Quotes

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

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

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
― Gertrude Stein

“You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don't dance
So you might as well
dance.”
― Gertrude Stein

“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.”
― Gertrude Stein

“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.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing”
― Gertrude Stein, Three Lives & Tender Buttons

“One must dare to be happy. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”
― Gertrude Stein

“There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There's your answer.”
― Gertrude Stein

“We are always the same age inside. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Let me listen to me and not to them.”
― Gertrude Stein

“I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“You attract what you need like a lover”
― Gertrude Stein

“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”
― Gertrude Stein

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“You have to know what you want to get it.”
― Gertrude Stein

“You are all a lost generation.”
― Gertrude Stein

“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”
― 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

“Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous”
― Gertrude Stein

“Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”
― 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, Tender Buttons

“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?”
― Gertrude Stein

“You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!”
― Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

“There is no there 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

“America is my country, and Paris is my home town.”
― 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 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“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.”
― Gertrude Stein

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Affectations can be dangerous.”
― Gertrude Stein

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

“If you can do it then why do it?”
― Gertrude Stein

“The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one's living and has to fear want and disease and death....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.

~ September, 1943”
― Gertrude Stein

“Whenever you get there, there is no there there.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”
― 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, Tender Buttons

“If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”
― 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, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”
― Gertrude Stein

“It is a very strange feeling when one is loving a clock that is to every one of your class of living an ugly and a foolish one and one really likes such a thing and likes it very much and liking it is a serious thing, or one likes a colored handkerchief that is very gay and every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing and thinks you like it because it is a funny thing to like it and you like it with a serious feeling, or you like eating something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.”
― Gertrude Stein

“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.”
― Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

“I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”
― Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”
― 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, Tender Buttons

“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, Tender Buttons