Gertrude Stein Quotes

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting.

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.

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.

You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.

Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?

Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It's 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.

I had a family. They can be a nuisance in identity but there is no doubt no shadow of doubt that that identity the family identity we can do without.

... there is no point in being realistic about here and now, no use at all not any, and so it is not the nineteenth but the twentieth century, there is no realism now, life is not real it is not earnest, it is strange which is an entirely different matter.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

If you are a thinker, you will change the language. You will not use words the way others do.

Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.

Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so.

The one thing that everybody wants is to be freenot to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free … The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.

I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.

A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

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.

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.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

What is the use of being a little boy if you are growing up to be a man.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Everywhere there was somewhere and everywhere there they were men women children dogs cows wild pigs little rabbits cats lizards and animals. That is the way it was. And everybody dogs cats sheep rabbits and lizards and children all wanted to tell ... all about themselves.

Some out of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a nuisance to them, a terror perhaps to them, a difficult thing to be forgetting.

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

Nothing has happened today except kindness.

The artist works by locating the world in himself

It is very difficult in quarreling to be certain in either one what the other one is remembering. It is very often astonishing to each one quarreling to find out what the other one was remembering for quarreling. Mostly in quarreling not any one is finding out what the other one is remembering for quarreling, what the other one is remembering from quarreling.

Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

History takes time. History makes memory.

One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.

Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

art is the pulse of a nation.

A country house is not the same as a house in a country and a hotel in the country is not the same as a hotel in a town but is it in a small town.

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.