The kind of loving women and men have in them and the ways it comes out from them makes for them the bottom nature in them, gives to them their kind of thinking, makes the character they have all their living in them, makes them then their kind of women and men and there are always many millions made of each kind of them.
Gertrude SteinNo one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
Gertrude SteinThe thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.
Gertrude SteinTo know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing.
Gertrude SteinI often think how celebrated I am. / It is difficult not to think how celebrated I am. / And if I think how celebrated I am / They know who know that I am new / That is I knew I know how celebrated I am / And after all it astonishes even me.
Gertrude SteinMore great Americans were failures than they were successes. They mostly spent their lives in not having a buyer for what they had for sale.
Gertrude SteinEating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.
Gertrude Stein