Gertrude Stein Quotes

255 Sourced Quotes

Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.

Gertrude Stein
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
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

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
Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell... all about themselves.

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
Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

Gertrude Stein
One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.

Gertrude Stein
I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.

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
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
Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.

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
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to 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
If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.

Gertrude Stein
Mostly every one is needing some one to be one listening to that one being one being one boasting.

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

Gertrude Stein
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

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
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
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 day about money.

Gertrude Stein
A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover.
A at most.
Saint saint a saint.

Gertrude Stein