Gertrude Stein: Trending quotes

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Gertrude Stein: 320 quotes25 likes

“I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.”

As quoted in Red Rabbit : A novel (2002) by Tom Clancy, p. 153

“Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing 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 book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.”

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain.
There. Make twenty-five be a woman. The meaning of that does not interest me. It is a complexion that interests that makes ridiculous because that does not make it something else. But it does make them which is again me.
Make twenty-five be a woman. I do not lose it. The color is there. Do you see. Dependent entirely upon how one word follows another. Who knows how Howard likes hearing. I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. Forget grammar and think about potatoes. Grammar after all has to do with why they were presented.”

How to Write (1931), Ch. 4: A Grammarian [Dover, 1975, ISBN 0-486-23144-5] p. 109

“The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.”

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

“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.”

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 2

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

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

“Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.”

Libretto for the opera The Mother Of Us All by Virgil Thomson (1947), from Last Operas and Plays (1949)

“It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.”

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”

Quoted by Frederic Prokosch in Voices: A Memoir (1983)

“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.”

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 107

“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 book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.”

Statement about World War II (written in 1943), p. 77
Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“It bothers a lot of people, but like you said, it's nobody's business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it.”

Stein's comment about homosexuality and homophobia, from a conversation with Samuel Steward recounted in Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (1977)

“A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything.
Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.”

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

“Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.”

Libretto for the opera The Mother Of Us All by Virgil Thomson (1947), from Last Operas and Plays (1949)

“If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything.”

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