Top 300 Gertrude Stein Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”

— Gertrude Stein

102. “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

103. “Forensics is eloquence and reduction.”

— Gertrude Stein

104. “Let me listen to me and not to them.”

— Gertrude Stein

105. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

106. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

107. “Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet.”

— Gertrude Stein

108. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

109. “Well money is not easy to describe. It is easy to lose but it cannot be lost, and no one can get really get used to it.”

— Gertrude Stein

110. “Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.”

— Gertrude Stein

111. “Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions it is an intellectual recreation and there is nopossible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that as long as humanity is anything.”

— Gertrude Stein

112. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

113. “We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don’t know that men can do what women can do. That’s absolutely crucial. We can’t go on doing two jobs.”

— Gertrude Stein

114. “There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.”

— Gertrude Stein

115. “What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.”

— Gertrude Stein

116. “Literature – creative literature – unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.”

— Gertrude Stein

117. “Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.”

— Gertrude Stein

118. “Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”

— Gertrude Stein

119. “This is the place of places and and it is here.”

— Gertrude Stein

120. “It is better to lose and win, than win and be defeated.”

— Gertrude Stein

121. “Eating too much meat gives you indigestion and evil thoughts make you eat too much meat.”

— Gertrude Stein

122. “Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.”

— Gertrude Stein

123. “Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.”

— Gertrude Stein

124. “I’ll always be Alice Toklas if you’ll be Gertrude Stein.”

— Gertrude Stein

125. “The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.”

— Gertrude Stein

126. “I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it.”

— Gertrude Stein

127. “The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.”

— Gertrude Stein

128. “Cooking like everything else in France is logic and fashion.”

— Gertrude Stein

129. “The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.”

— Gertrude Stein

130. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

131. “Coffee is 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.”

— Gertrude Stein

132. “The phenomenon of nature is more splendid than the daily events of nature, certainly, so then the twentieth century is splendid.”

— Gertrude Stein

133. “The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.”

— Gertrude Stein

134. “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”

— Gertrude Stein

135. “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it...”

— Gertrude Stein

136. “Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke.”

— Gertrude Stein

137. “Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.”

— Gertrude Stein

138. “How I wish I were able to say what I think...”

— Gertrude Stein

139. “I like loving. I like mostly all the ways one can have of having loving feelings in them. Slowly it has come to be in me that any way of being a loving one is interesting and not unpleasant to me.”

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

141. “A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.”

— Gertrude Stein

142. “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.”

— Gertrude Stein

143. “How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.”

— Gertrude Stein

144. “The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.”

— Gertrude Stein

145. “It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.”

— Gertrude Stein

146. “From the very nature of progress, all ages must be transitional. If they were not, the world would be at a stand-still and death would speedily ensue. It is one of the tamest of platitudes but it is always introduced by a flourish of trumpets.”

— Gertrude Stein

147. “If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.”

— Gertrude Stein

148. “A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.”

— Gertrude Stein

149. “But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?’”

— Gertrude Stein

150. “One must either accept some theory or else believe one’s own instinct or follow the world’s opinion.”

— Gertrude Stein