Gertrude Stein Quotes

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

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.

... anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high, the air heavy or clear and anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn and everything.

Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.

Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.

There are a lot of other things besides nouns.

When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.

Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.

How I wish I were able to say what I think.

Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.

A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.

It is nice in France they adapt themselves to everything slowly they change completely but all the time they know that they are as they were.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Remarks aren't literature.

Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.