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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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...
Gertrude Stein
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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.
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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I tell you old and young are better than tired middle-aged, nothing is so dead dead-tired, dead every way as middle-aged.
Gertrude Stein
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Star-light, what is star-light, star-light is a little light that is not always mentioned with the sun, it is mentioned with the moon and the sun, it is mixed up with the rest of the time.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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French people do like good fighting, they like it better than anything.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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College professors have two bad traits. They are logical
and they are easily flattered.
Gertrude Stein
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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
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Once upon a time the world was round, and you could go on it around and around.
Gertrude Stein
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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
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Dogs are dogs, you sometimes think that they are not but they are. And they always are here there and everywhere.
Gertrude Stein
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Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Gertrude Stein
Creative Commons
Born:
February 3, 1874
Died:
July 27, 1946
(aged 72)
Bio:
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, and playwright.
Known for:
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)
Tender Buttons
Three Lives (1909)
The Making of Americans (1925)
Everybody's Autobiography (1937)
Most used words:
money
time
living
sense
war
gay
people
audience
live
rose
generation
day
clear
you
identity
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