Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

Gertrude Stein
Growing has no connection with audience.
Audience has no connection with identity.
Identity has no connection with a universe.
A universe has no connection with human nature.

Gertrude Stein
Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

Gertrude Stein
Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain.
There. Make twenty-five be a woman. The meaning of that does not interest me. It is a complexion that interests that makes ridiculous because that does not make it something else. But it does make them which is again me.
Make twenty-five be a woman. I do not lose it. The color is there. Do you see. Dependent entirely upon how one word follows another. Who knows how Howard likes hearing. I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. Forget grammar and think about potatoes. Grammar after all has to do with why they were presented.

Gertrude Stein
Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.

Gertrude Stein
When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.

Gertrude Stein
What's the use of being a little boy if you are going to grow up to be a man?

Gertrude Stein
Disillusionment in living is the finding out nobody agrees with you not those that are and were fighting with you. Disillusionment in living is the finding out nobody agrees with you not those that are fighting for you. Complete disillusionment is when you realise that no one can for they can't change.

Gertrude Stein
It bothers a lot of people, but like you said, it's nobody's business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it.

Gertrude Stein
There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it. Slowly I come to understand it. Many years I listened and did not know it. I heard it, I understood it some, I did not know I heard it. They repeat themselves now and I listen to it. Every way that they do it now I hear it. Now each time very slowly I come to understand it. Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.

Gertrude Stein
I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he cannot wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait.

Gertrude Stein
More great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.

Gertrude Stein
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

Gertrude Stein
I just tell you, and though I don't sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there ain't any answer, there ain't going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

Gertrude Stein
In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.

Gertrude Stein
Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.

Gertrude Stein
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

Gertrude Stein
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

Gertrude Stein
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.

Gertrude Stein
I can eat it with a spoon or with a soup ladle or anything and I like it.

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

Gertrude Stein
Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers' granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Gertrude Stein
There will never be anything in America more interesting than the Civil War, never.

Gertrude Stein
I manage to think twice about everything
Why will they like me as they do
Or not as they do
Why will they praise me as they do
Or praise me not not as they do.

Gertrude Stein
The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant tills it.

Gertrude Stein
If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.

Gertrude Stein
Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

Gertrude Stein
A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything.
Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

Gertrude Stein
When you earn it and spend it you do know the difference between three dollars and a million dollars, but when you say it and vote it, it all sounds the same.

Gertrude Stein
The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Gertrude Stein