Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
Gertrude SteinThe 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