Who is Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life.
Gertrude Stein Quotes
1. One must dare to be happy.
2. We are always the same age inside.
3. It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.
4. Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
5. You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don’t dance
So you might as well
dance.
6. If you can’t say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.
7. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
8. In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.
9. 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.
10. There ain’t no answer.
There ain’t gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There’s your answer.
11. Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.
12. A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
13. Let me listen to me and not to them.
14. Tt 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.
15. 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
16. Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?
17. You attract what you need like a lover
18. I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich.
19. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
20. There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.
21. You have to know what you want to get it.
22. You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.
23. If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
24. You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!
25. Whenever you get there, there is no there there.
26. You are all a lost generation
27. Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous
28. It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
29. After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
30. The one thing that everybody wants is to be free…not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one’s living and has to fear want and disease and death….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.
31. I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing
32. If you can do it then why do it?
33. 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?
34. She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
35. I am I because my little dog knows me.
36. 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.
37. Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
38. There is no there there.
39. 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.
40. A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
41. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.
42. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.
43. It is very easy to love alone.
44. A rose is a rose is a rose.
45. This is the place of places and and it is here.
46. 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.
47. The artist works by locating the world in himself
48. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.
49. If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.
50. 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.
51. It is a very strange feeling when one is loving a clock that is to every one of your class of living an ugly and a foolish one and one really likes such a thing and likes it very much and liking it is a serious thing, or one likes a colored handkerchief that is very gay and every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing and thinks you like it because it is a funny thing to like it and you like it with a serious feeling, or you like eating something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.
52. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
53. War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
54. How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love.
55. Affectations can be dangerous.
56. Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life
57. Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.
58. What good are roots if you can’t take them with you
59. I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.
60. Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.
