My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein Quotes

“Gertrude Stein wanted to kill the nineteenth century. The twenty first century seems to be killing itself.”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

“No one could bring themselves to dig up the grimy old fascism word from the twentieth century and paste it on to the twenty-first century, or to say things like ‘never again’ or to exclaim, in regard to officials and armies who participate in ethnic cleansing, ‘I just don’t understand how humans can obey those sorts of orders.’ No one wanted to dig it all up,”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

“The problem is that men my age are intolerable. I am required to listen to them speak for the duration of our encounter but they never ask me any questions about my own life. There are a few exceptions. These exceptions are incredible men. They are so rare we must treat them like snow leopards.”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

“I’m very proud to be your publisher, Miss Stein, but as I’ve always told you, I don’t understand very much of what you’re saying.’ Gertrude replied, ‘Well, I’ve always told you Bennett, you’re a very nice boy but you’re rather stupid.”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

“The living have appetites. Desires. To drive us mad. To make us joyful. To make us cry. To lead us up the wrong path and down the right path. The dead have done all that. The dead who can no longer feel the rain had spent a lifetime creating themselves.”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

“Creating herself. Creating themselves. The performance of it. The confusion of it. The pleasure of it...Making a life. Making a life with love in it. Creating a body with no shame in it...Creating a body of work. That no one else could have written.”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein