Gertrude Stein Quotes

One must dare to be happy.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

I have been the creative literary mind of the century.

From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional.

But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.

Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.

What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.

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.

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.

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.

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.

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.

Affectations can be dangerous.

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

Eating 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.

You are all a lost generation.

Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

Success is the result achieved when nobody answers.

I manage to think twice about everything / Why will they like me as they do / Or not as they do / Why will they praise me as they do / Or praise me not not as they do.

Some men and women are inquisitive about everything, they are always asking, if they see any one with anything they ask what is that thing, what is it you are carrying, what are you going to be doing with that thing, why have you that thing, where did you get that thing, how long will you have that thing, there are very many men and women who want to know about anything about everything.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

You have to know what you want. And if it seems to take you off the track, don't hold back, because perhaps that is instinctively where you want to be. And if you hold back and try to be always where you have been before, you will go dry.

To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.

There is no such thing as a natural sentence but there is such a thing as a natural paragraph and it must be found.

You can either buy clothes or buy pictures.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

August is a month when if it is hot weather it is really very hot.

This is the place of places and and it is here.

If you can do it then why do it?

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

[On Ezra Pound:] A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.

there are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Forensics is eloquence and reduction.

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.