Top 100 Quotes About Gertrude Stein
#1. 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
#3. 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
#4. [Gertrude Stein] really needed someone like Virgil Thomson, whom she respected, to sit on her a bit and make her devise some plot.
James Laughlin
#5. I'll always be Alice Toklas if you'll be Gertrude Stein.
Gertrude Stein
#6. The two greatest mannequins of the century were Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell - unquestionably. You just couldn't take a bad picture of those two old girls
Diana Vreeland
#7. You are all a lost generation, Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.
James Thurber
#8. 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
#9. He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.
Anne Carson
#10. [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
#11. Gertrude Stein really thought of Hemingway as frail. He almost married Stein.
Leslie Fiedler
#12. 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
#13. Gertrude Stein said, "I write for myself and strangers." I would say I write for myself, strangers and the great dead.
Edward Hirsch
#14. 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
#15. You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]
Ernest Hemingway,
#16. Ultimately, people write to be understood (excepting Gertrude Stein and Tristan Tzara, who were intentionally being difficult).
John Scalzi
#17. Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.
James Laughlin
#18. It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.
Raymond Queneau
#19. Gertrude Stein was masterly in making nothing happen very slowly.
Clifton Fadiman
#20. Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, 'You're all a lost generation.' That got around to certain people and we all said, 'Whee! We're lost.
Dorothy Parker
#21. Gertrude Stein ... the Madame Curie of language. Because in her deep research she has crushed thousands of tons of matter to extract the radium of the word.
Mina Loy
#22. Going to bed with Gertrude Stein, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Susan Sontag, or Margaret Thatcher: There are some things one prefers neither to do nor to have done.
Edward Abbey
#23. Godiva was tired and old and Gertrude Stein in spring bought a new car ...
Alice B. Toklas
#24. I don't want to get too involved in marketing budgets, online promotions and download set-ups because it would be a bit like Gertrude Stein mapping out a TV campaign. I want to sing. I want visibility. I am essentially Al Martino, not Seymour Stein.
Morrissey
#25. ON HER DEATHBED, Gertrude Stein is said to have asked, 'What is the answer?' Then, after a long silence, 'What is the question?' Don't start looking in the Bible for the answers it gives. Start by listening for the questions it asks.
Frederick Buechner
#27. After a while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.
Gertrude Stein
#28. 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
#29. Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.
Gertrude Stein
#30. I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.
Gertrude Stein
#31. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein
#32. When is there some discharge when. There never is.
Gertrude Stein
#33. If you write a half hour a day it makes a lot of writing year by year.
Gertrude Stein
#34. 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
#35. Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.
Gertrude Stein
#37. 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
#38. It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
Gertrude Stein
#39. A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.
Gertrude Stein
#40. I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich.
Gertrude Stein
#41. 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
#42. Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
Gertrude Stein
#43. Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.
Gertrude Stein
#44. 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
#45. Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
Gertrude Stein
#52. What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
Gertrude Stein
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
Gertrude Stein
#58. Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.
Gertrude Stein
#60. Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
Gertrude Stein
#62. Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
Gertrude Stein
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
Gertrude Stein
#66. Suppose no one asked a question.
What would the answer be?
Gertrude Stein
#67. The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
Gertrude Stein
#68. If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.
Gertrude Stein
#69. A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
Gertrude Stein
#70. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening.
Gertrude Stein
#71. Each generation has something different at which they are all looking.
Gertrude Stein
#73. Superstition is believing that something means anything and that anything means something and that each thing means a particular thing and will mean a particular thing is coming. Oh yes it does.
Gertrude Stein
#74. Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.
Gertrude Stein
#75. Dogs are dogs, you sometimes think that they are not but they are. And they always are here there and everywhere.
Gertrude Stein
#76. A FEATHER.
A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.
Gertrude Stein
#77. 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
#78. At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.
Gertrude Stein
#79. I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.
Gertrude Stein
#80. Nothing is more interesting than that something that you eat.
Gertrude Stein
#81. It is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
Gertrude Stein
#82. 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
#83. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
Gertrude Stein
#85. 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
#86. There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.
Gertrude Stein
#87. There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.
Gertrude Stein
#88. 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
#89. 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
#91. The way to resume is to resume.
If we knew everything ahead of time, all would be dictation not creation.
Gertrude Stein
#92. 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
#94. I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
Gertrude Stein
#95. There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.
Gertrude Stein
#96. There are two kinds of men and women, those who have in them resisting as their way of winning those who have in them attacking as their way of winning ...
Gertrude Stein
#97. Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
Gertrude Stein
#98. You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.
Gertrude Stein
#99. So many words to use. Oh do not say that words have a use.
Gertrude Stein
#100. A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
Gertrude Stein
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