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Gertrude Stein: 320 quotes25 likes

“If you can do it then why do it?”

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936), Afterword of a later edition

“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

“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 book Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms

Source: Tender Buttons

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

Gertrude Stein

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

Gertrude Stein

Source: Lectures in America

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

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

“What is the answer?" [ I was silent ] "In that case, what is the question?”

Gertrude Stein

Last words (27 July 1946) as told by Alice B. Toklas in What Is Remembered (1963)

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”

Gertrude Stein

"How Writing is Written," Choate Literary Magazine (February 1935)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

“It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.”

Gertrude Stein

"What Is English Literature?" (1935)

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

Gertrude Stein

Four in America (1933)

“In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.”

Gertrude Stein

The Geographical History of America (1936)

“Pigeons on the grass alas.
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass.
Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass.”

Gertrude Stein

Four Saints in Three Acts (1927)
Operas and Plays (1932)

“But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and the will be all the same.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 28

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

Gertrude Stein

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936), Afterword of a later edition

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

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 3