Top 300 Gertrude Stein Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

52. “Nature is not natural and that is natural enough.”

— Gertrude Stein

53. “Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.”

— Gertrude Stein

54. “If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

56. “I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”

— Gertrude Stein

57. “A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

59. “Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”

— Gertrude Stein

60. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

62. “Nobody knows what I am trying to do but I do and I know when I succeed.”

— Gertrude Stein

63. “It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened.”

— Gertrude Stein

64. “Remarks are not literature.”

— Gertrude Stein

65. “It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”

— Gertrude Stein

66. “When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.”

— Gertrude Stein

67. “More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.”

— Gertrude Stein

68. “Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.”

— Gertrude Stein

69. “Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous.”

— Gertrude Stein

70. “It is very easy to love alone.”

— Gertrude Stein

71. “There are a lot of other things besides nouns.”

— Gertrude Stein

72. “If fishes were wishes the ocean would be all of our desire.”

— Gertrude Stein

73. “I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.”

— Gertrude Stein

74. “Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.”

— Gertrude Stein

75. “F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

77. “Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the Reality and interested in telling about it.”

— Gertrude Stein

78. “Action and reaction are equal and opposite.”

— Gertrude Stein

79. “Everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.”

— Gertrude Stein

80. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century.”

— Gertrude Stein

81. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

83. “More and more I am certain that the only difference between man and animals is that men can count and animals cannot and if they count they mostly do count money...”

— Gertrude Stein

84. “I am I because my little dog knows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are you and your recognising that he knows, that is what destroys creation. That is what makes school.”

— Gertrude Stein

85. “Suppose no one asked a question. What would the answer be?”

— Gertrude Stein

86. “I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

88. “Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.”

— Gertrude Stein

89. “And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.”

— Gertrude Stein

90. “Affectations can be dangerous.”

— Gertrude Stein

91. “Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realising everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.”

— Gertrude Stein

92. “Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

94. “When I said. A rose is a rose is a rose. And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.”

— Gertrude Stein

95. “History takes time. History makes memory.”

— Gertrude Stein

96. “Sugar is not a vegetable.”

— Gertrude Stein

97. “Nature and man are opposed in Spain.”

— Gertrude Stein

98. “I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

100. “Forensics is eloquence and reduction.”

— Gertrude Stein