Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

There are many ways of eating, for some eating is living for some eating is dying, for some thinking about ways of eating gives to them the feeling that they have it in them to be alive and to be going on living, to some to think about eating makes them know that death is always waiting that dying is in them.

Gertrude Stein
This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.

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
There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.

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
I don't envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.

Gertrude Stein
She reads anything and everything and even now hates to be disturbed and above all however often she has read a book and however foolish the book may be no one must make fun of it or tell her how it goes on. It is still as it always was real to her.

Gertrude Stein
She was a tempting dog, she loved to tempt other dogs to do what they should not. She never did what she should not but they did when she showed them where it was.

Gertrude Stein
After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it.

Gertrude Stein
An audience is pleasant if you have it, it is flattering and flattering is agreeable always, but if you have an audience the being an audience is their business, they are the audience you are the writer, let each attend to their own business.

Gertrude Stein
Each generation has something different at which they are all looking.

Gertrude Stein
It often makes me know that as a cousin of mine once said about money, money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

Gertrude Stein
Well money is not easy to describe. It is easy to lose but it cannot be lost, and no one can get really get used to it.

Gertrude Stein
I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it.

Gertrude Stein
She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

Gertrude Stein
I had a family. They can be a nuisance in identity but there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do without.

Gertrude Stein
Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting.
One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

Gertrude Stein
Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

Gertrude Stein
The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.

Gertrude Stein
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.

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
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
The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.

Gertrude Stein
The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Gertrude Stein
It is all the question of identity.... As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside.

Gertrude Stein
If nobody had to die how would there be room enough for any of us who now live to have lived.

Gertrude Stein
The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don't understand.

Gertrude Stein
Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

Gertrude Stein
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.

Gertrude Stein
Suppose no one asked a question, what would be the answer.

Gertrude Stein