"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 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

"If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something."
— Gertrude Stein

"Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"
— 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 and Tender Buttons)

"There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. "
— 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

"Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."
— 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

"Let me listen to me and not to them."
— Gertrude Stein

"One must dare to be happy. "
— Gertrude Stein

"I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. "
— 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

"You are all a lost generation."
— Gertrude Stein

"For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts."
— Gertrude Stein

"Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous"
— Gertrude Stein

"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)

"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

"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

"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)

"You have to know what you want to get it."
— 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)

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

""What is a sentence. A sentence is left to be alright and therefor (sic) they are barely here.
A day is additional with there having been with a condition of remaining all day which it is partly that they like to look about made it for them in reference as they knew that is whenever they met by the arrangement which had been made for them in the mean time. What is a sentence. They need not be having them made by them.
in 'Sentences' chapter, p. 175 my edition, How to Write." "
— Gertrude Stein

"Bailing the center of a spot and not having an embankment is not the only way to flirt. So soon, so left without a spoon, so august and so strange and taller than every other, it is not astonishing that someone is older."
— Gertrude Stein (Geography and Plays)

"a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"
— Gertrude Stein

"Affectations can be dangerous."
— 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

"It takes a heap of loafing to write a good book."
— Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons)

"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

"Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful."
— Gertrude Stein

"War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

"
— Gertrude Stein

"You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don't dance
So you might as well
dance."
— Gertrude Stein

"It takes a heap of doing nothing to write a good book.

"
— Gertrude Stein

"You attract what you need like a lover"
— Gertrude Stein

"If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation."
— Gertrude Stein

"She says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done."
— Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

""You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!" "
— Gertrude Stein (Everybody's Autobiography)

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

"It takes a heap of loafing to write a book."
— Gertrude Stein

""Let me listen to me and not to them."
"
— Gertrude Stein

"If you can do it then why do it?"
— Gertrude Stein

"Let me listen to me and not to them."
— 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

"A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm."
— Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms)

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

"The seam in between is fenceless."
— Gertrude Stein