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Gertrude Stein Quotes
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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. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.In 1933, Stein published a quasi-memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of the cult-literature scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. Two quotes from her works have become widely known: "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose," and "there is no there there", with the latter often taken to be a reference to her childhood home of Oakland.

Her books include Q.E.D. , about a lesbian romantic affair involving several of Stein's friends, Fernhurst, a fictional story about a love triangle, Three Lives , and The Making of Americans . In Tender Buttons , Stein commented on lesbian sexuality.Her activities during World War II have been the subject of analysis and commentary. As a Jew living in Nazi-occupied France, Stein may have only been able to sustain her lifestyle as an art collector, and indeed to ensure her physical safety, through the protection of the powerful Vichy government official and Nazi collaborator Bernard Faÿ. After the war ended, Stein expressed admiration for another Nazi collaborator, Vichy leader Marshal Pétain.



Wikipedia  

✵ 3. February 1874 – 27. July 1946   •   Other names Gertruda Steinová, Gertruda Stein
Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein: 160   quotes 24   likes

Gertrude Stein Quotes

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

Gertrude Stein

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

Religion , Hope

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

Gertrude Stein

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)

Way , Feeling

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Dreams

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Color , Thinking , Dependency , Forgetting

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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)

Youth , Fight

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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.”

Gertrude Stein

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.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Men , People , Strong

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Family

“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)

Way

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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

War

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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)

Money , People , Way , Business

“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.”

Gertrude Stein

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

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

Gertrude Stein

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.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Men , Dogs , Star , Sun

“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

Time

“One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Paris France (1940)

Painting

“I don’t envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.”

Gertrude Stein

"Answer to Eugene Jolas," Transition (March 1932)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

Animals

“I was talking like this to the Princeton professor and he said well if these are the facts there is no hope and I said well what is hope hope is just contact with the facts.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Hope

“Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.”

Gertrude Stein

An American and France (1936)

Distant

“When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.”

Gertrude Stein

Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (1931)

Dreams , Sleep

“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Nature , Thinking , Future

“Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 56

People , Business

“When I said. "A rose is a rose is a rose." And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do? I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.”

Gertrude Stein

"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)

“They wanted to know how I succeeded in getting so much publicity, I said by having a small audience, I said if you have a big audience you have no publicity, this did seem to worry them and naturally it would worry them they wanted the publicity and the big audience, and really to have the biggest publicity you have to have a small one, yes all right the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one, but it is really exciting and therefore it has the biggest publicity, all right that is it.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Nature

“Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”

Gertrude Stein

"Poetry and Grammar"
Lectures in America (1935)

Love