Gertrude Stein: Trending quotes (page 5)

“Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious and they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.”

Gertrude Stein

"The Capital and Capitals of the United States of America," New York Herald Tribune (9 March 1935)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

“After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4

Life , War , Dogs , Business

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

Gertrude Stein

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

Way , Dead

“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

"The Situation in American Writing," Partisan Review (Summer 1939)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

Thinking , Chance

“The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 5

“When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.”

Gertrude Stein

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

Nature

“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

Gertrude Stein

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923). First published in Vanity Fair.

History

“Alice Toklas' father had almost once had an oil well they dug and dug but naturally the oil did not gush, naturally not these things never do happen to any one one knows, if it could happen to them you would not be very likely to know them most naturally not.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4

Nature

“A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover.
A at most.
Saint saint a saint.”

Gertrude Stein

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

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

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Paris France (1940)

“Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Love , Lie , World , Peace

“The surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth century. Picasso only sees something else, another reality. Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare.”

Gertrude Stein Picasso

Picasso (1938)

World , Way , Reality

“When General Osborne came to see me just after the victory, he asked me what I thought should be done to educate the Germans. I said there is only one thing to be done and that is to teach them disobedience, as long as they are obedient so long sooner or later they will be ordered about by a bad man and there will be trouble. Teach them disobedience, I said, make every German child know that it is its duty at least once a day to do its good deed and not believe something its father or its teacher tells them, confuse their minds, get their minds confused and perhaps then they will be disobedient and the world will be at peace. The obedient peoples go to war, disobedient people like peace, that is the reason that Italy did not really become a good Axis, the people were not obedient enough, the Japs and the Germans are the only really obedient people on earth and see what happens, teach them disobedience, confuse their minds, teach them disobedience, and the world can be peaceful. General Osborne shook his head sadly, you'll never make the heads of an army understand that.”

Gertrude Stein

Off we all went to see Germany. In: LIFE Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 6, August 6, 1945, S.56, ISSN 0024-3019. google books https://books.google.at/books?id=0EkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA54&lpg=PA54&dq=%22gertrude+stein%22+%22off+we+all+went%22&source=bl&ots=xOi2_KGtgA&sig=rCjhy5aEb48I1LiWrDQNNVtw37c&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwij1sqZr7_cAhUFdcAKHQQhB_sQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22gertrude%20stein%22%20%22off%20we%20all%20went%22&f=false

War , People , World , Education

“And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.”

Gertrude Stein

An American and France (1936)

Life

“Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.”

Gertrude Stein

"Form and Intelligibility," from The Radcliffe Manuscripts (1949); written in 1895 as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College

Help

“I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.”

Gertrude Stein

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