Top 100 Gertrude's Quotes
#1. Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.
Gertrude Stein
#2. I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.
Gertrude Stein
#3. All the earth is seamed with roads, and all the sea is furrowed with the tracks of ships, and over all the roads and all the waters a continuous stream of people passes up and down - traveling, as they say, for their pleasure. What is it, I wonder, that they go out to see?
Gertrude Bell
#4. I had fallen in love with a young man ... , and we were planning to get married. And then he died of subacute bacterial endocarditis ... Two years later with the advent of penicillin, he would have been saved. It reinforced in my mind the importance of scientific discovery ...
Gertrude B. Elion
#5. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein
#7. If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
Gertrude Stein
#8. Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.
Gertrude Stein
#9. Aww, whats the problem, gertrude? You mean to tell me that you can't walk into a bar with a $100 bill on your forehead and walk with anything, either male or female?
Roddy Piper
#10. Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.
Gertrude Stein
#11. His pictures of this region summarize the soulful emptiness of a country where, as Gertrude Stein observed, 'there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.
Sarah Vowell
#13. When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what
did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed
a noun.
Gertrude Stein
#14. It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
Gertrude Stein
#15. A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.
Gertrude Stein
#16. I'm not buried in that plot, Karoline. Some woman claiming to be me from the future is."
"Why do they call it a plot, anyway?"
"Because this is how every story ends.
Brian K. Vaughan
#17. Whether you fail or set the world on fire cannot make so very much difference if only you have the opportunity to try for it, to work for it, to think of nothing else!
Gertrude Atherton
#18. But her role had changed; she was now available for marriage and her primary task was to find a mate. As Florence and Hugh Bell's daughter, she was expected to make an excellent match. And if there wasn't one here, at least she would learn how to conduct herself for the chase.
Janet Wallach
#19. I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich.
Gertrude Stein
#21. Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it's something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup
Gertrude Stein
#22. To plant and maintain a flower border, with a good scheme for colour, is by no means the easy thing that is commonly supposed.
Gertrude Jekyll
#23. Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein
#24. But what do you think, my lady?'
'I think that she must be cruel if she wants to be loved,' Gertrude explained. ' For once a lady succumbs to the man's desire, he rejects her as unworthy of it.'...Was love like a hunger, easily satisfied by feeding? Or did it grow by what it fed on?
Lisa Klein
#25. Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
Gertrude Stein
#26. If my own experience had taught me anything, it was that, if a thing had to be done, it could be done.
Gertrude Lawrence
#27. And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.
Gertrude Stein
#28. Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
Gertrude Stein
#37. What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
Gertrude Stein
#39. 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
#40. The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.
Gertrude Stein
#41. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein
#43. Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.
Gertrude Stein
#44. So the legs are little short, the knees maybe knock a little but who listens?
Gertrude Berg
#45. If there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?
Gertrude Atherton
#46. I do not envy the owners of very large gardens. The garden should fit its owner or his or her tastes, just as one's clothes do; it should be neither too large nor too small, but just comfortable.
Gertrude Jekyll
#47. The curse of human nature is imagination. When a long anticipated moment comes, we always find it pitched a note too low, for the wings of imagination are crushed into its withering sides under the crowding hordes of petty realities.
Gertrude Atherton
#49. Slowly I came to know that the depth of our heartbreaks determines the depth of our faith. God gives us everything to conquer the big and the little hurts of life.
Gertrude Ederle
#50. Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
Gertrude Stein
#51. [Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.
Gertrude Atherton
#54. This is what I like," said Jesse. "Everything seems better when we have to work to get it.
Gertrude Chandler Warner
#56. On they went, past the hen houses. These were all mended and painted. They went through a field to the street. It was very strange
Gertrude Chandler Warner
#57. Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
Gertrude Stein
#58. 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
#59. In America ... who is to stop congress from spending too much money. They will not stop themselves, that is certain. Everybody has to think about that now. Who is to stop them.
Gertrude Stein
#60. I had learned of Gertrude Stein's bon mot that medicine opened all doors. This prompted me, in different moods, to view my future life as literary psychiatrist, globe-trotting tropical disease specialist, or academic internist.
Harold E. Varmus
#61. One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
Gertrude Stein
#62. Suppose no one asked a question.
What would the answer be?
Gertrude Stein
#63. The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
Gertrude Stein
#64. If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.
Gertrude Stein
#65. A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
Gertrude Stein
#66. It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny.
Gertrude Stein
#67. Some people have family crests, lions, tigers, unicorns, elephants - a whole menagerie - and if my family had a crest, you know what would be on it? A blintze. I mean it. All the good things in my life are measured in blintzes because by us it's not a party if there isn't a blintze ...
Gertrude Berg
#68. We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.
Gertrude Stein
#69. In a notable family called Stein
There were Gertrude, and Ep, and then Ein.
Gert's writing was hazy,
Ep's statues were crazy,
And nobody understood Ein.
Bennett Cerf
#70. Nd looking up into Abednego's face she fought a battle inside herself with the thing that it was, a sort of grabbing thing, and then she held Gertrude out to him. "You have her," she said.
Elizabeth Goudge
#71. I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.
Gertrude Stein
#72. Our little ford was almost ready. She was later to be called Auntie after Gertrude Stein's aunt Pauline who always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was properly flattered.
Gertrude Stein
#73. [On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great while yet, for it is in such a limited edition, and reading it is anyhow a sort of permanent occupation.
Katherine Anne Porter
#74. Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding ... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.
Wyndham Lewis
#77. One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.
Gertrude Stein
#78. There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. (Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures)
Gertrude Stein
#79. I understand that, each time we contemplate with desire and devotion the Host in which is hidden Christ's Eucharistic Body, we increase our merits in heaven and secure special joys to be ours later in the beatific vision of God
Gertrude The Great
#81. Gertrude, behind her, again had just one ... That one little feather she had as a starter. But now that's enough, because now she is smarter.
Dr. Seuss
#82. I suppose the only time we ever really get to be happy in life - like one hundred percent blissful - is when we're little kids."
"Because there's less to worry about?"
"Because we're too stupid to know how worried we should be.
Brian K. Vaughan
#83. The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.
Gertrude Atherton
#84. Borscht is more than a soup, it's a weather vane. When my family says they want hot borscht I know winter is coming, and when they want cold borscht I know how far can spring be behind?
Gertrude Berg
#85. To accomplish artistic work, of any individual worth, nature must be seen through the medium of the artist's intellectual emotions.
Gertrude Kasebier
#86. A little superstition is a good thing to keep in one's bag of precautions.
Gertrude Atherton
#87. When it's all over and the on the air signs go off there isn't a more lost feeling in the world. The wonderful, exciting, even glamorous, studio is now just a room dirty with coffee cartons and cigarette butts.
Gertrude Berg
#88. Gertrude reckoned sherry had been as much to do with Myrtle's early retirement as had the demands of celebrating Diwali.
John Wiltshire
#89. 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
#90. I found myself stuck into a Gertrude's Dream Waltz universe. Like Gertrude, I was trapped inside a body that bellied little of the person inside, while simultaneously ensnared in a home filled with people that looked like the person inside the unsightly body.
Luella Christie
#91. When somebody tells me I cannot do something, that's when I do it,
Gertrude Ederle
#92. That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.
Gertrude Stein
#93. The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.
Randall Jarrell
#94. For the best building and planting ... the architect and gardener must have some knowledge of each other's business, and each must regard with feelings of kindly reverence the unknown domains of the other's higher knowledge.
Gertrude Jekyll
#95. You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.
Ernest Hemingway,
#96. Gertrude's remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word "Woe," which she handed out gaily declaring, "Woe is me.
Ross Wetzsteon
#97. There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There's your answer.
Gertrude Stein
#98. Now," Gertrude said as soon as they were seated, "tell me what's got you so upset, and don't bother denying it because I've known you too long not to recognize the anxiety radiating off you.
Elizabeth Camden
#99. Is the professor who insists we read Ernest Hemingway again instead of Gertrude Stein "obsessing"? Because although I did a BA in English, an MFA in Poetry, and a year's worth of a PhD, Stein was an author I had to discover on my own. She wasn't on the syllabus anywhere in all that time.
Laura Mullen
#100. It's so nice to be a spoke in the wheel, one that helps to turn, not one that hinders.
Gertrude Bell
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