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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

“If you do not remember while you are writing, it may seem confused to others but actually it is clear and eventually that clarity will be clear, that is what a master-piece is, but if you remember while you are writing it will seem clear at the time to any one but the clarity will go out of it that is what a master-piece is not.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Time

“Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of the inner and outer reality. She has reproduced simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should never be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry and prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.”

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Source: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), p. 259

Beauty , Music , Reality , Passion

“A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.
A creator who creates, who is not an academician, who is not someone who studies in a school where the rules are already known, and of course being known they no longer exist, a creator then who creates is necessarily of his generation. His generation lives in its contemporary way but they only live in it. In art, in literature, in the theatre, in short in everything that does not contribute to their immediate comfort they live in the preceding generation.”

Gertrude Stein Picasso

Picasso (1938)

School , Art , Way , Literature

“It often makes me know that as a cousin of mine once said about money, money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Wars I Have Seen (1945), p. 27

Money , Change

“Since it could be done what was the use of doing it, and anyway you always have to stop doing something sometime.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

Death , Fear , Idea , Forgetting

“The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.”

Gertrude Stein

Composition as Explanation (1926)

Art

“All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.”

Gertrude Stein

Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (1952) Pt. 1 (written 1940-1943)

World , Cry

“No sense in no sense innocence of what of not and what of delight. In no sense innocence in no sense and what in delight and not, in no sense innocence in no sense no sense what, in no sense and delight, and in no sense and delight and not in no sense and delight and not, no sense in no sense innocence and delight.”

Gertrude Stein

"Are There Arithmetics" (28 May 1927) [written in 1923]

Sense

“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.”

Gertrude Stein

"The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday; a Novel of Real Life" (1935)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

Dreams , Sleep , Change , Night

“Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Dogs

“I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he cannot wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Waiting

“Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Age , Thinking , Time

“The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“Growing has no connection with audience.
Audience has no connection with identity.
Identity has no connection with a universe.
A universe has no connection with human nature.”

Gertrude Stein

The Geographical History of America (1936)

Nature , Universe

“The two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Men , Way

“Before one is successful that is before any one is ready to pay money for anything you do then you are certain that every word you have written is an important word to have written and that any word you have written is as important as any other word and you keep everything you have written with great care.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Money , Success

“It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.”

Gertrude Stein

"As Eighty," from Bee Time Vine (1953, Yale University Press); written in 1923

“I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite, or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should we want to lose being a Negro… I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong names and so let us keep them.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Stupidity , Color , Strong

“It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.”

Gertrude Stein

An American and France (1936)

“Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.”

Gertrude Stein

Four in America (1933)

Understanding

“She took us to see her granddaughter who was teaching in the Dominican convent in San Raphael, we went across the bay on a ferry, that had not changed but Goat Island might just as well not have been there, anyway what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4, p. 289

Nature , Change

“I just tell you and though I dont sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there aint any answer, there aint going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that’s the answer.”

Gertrude Stein

Brewsie and Willie (1946), Ch. 7

Sense

“The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant tills it.”

Gertrude Stein

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

World

“I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“As there was never any question there was never any answer.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch.1

Question

“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”

Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

War

“Remarks are not literature.”

Gertrude Stein book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Comment to Ernest Hemingway, Ch. 7
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Literature

“The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just… I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.”

Gertrude Stein

Manuscript (1903), published in Q.E.D. Book 1, from Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (1971)

Understanding

“Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.”

Gertrude Stein

Quoted by Thornton Wilder, interview (December 14-15, 1956) with Richard Goldstone, The Paris Review: Writers at Work, First Series (1958)

People , Childhood

“It is a difficult thing to like anybody else's ideas of being funny.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Idea

“Human nature, human nature acts as it acts when it is identified when there is an identity but it is not human nature that has anything to do with that it is that anybody is there where they are, it is that that has to do with identity, with government and propaganda with history with individualism and with communism but it has nothing nothing to do with the human mind … because the human mind writes what there is and what has identity go to do with that … nothing at all.”

Gertrude Stein

Quoted in Really Reading Gertrude Stein : A Selected Anthology with essays (1989) by Judy Grahn (Crossing Press ISBN 0-895-94380-8, p. 253

History , Communication , Nature

“Suppose no one asked a question, what would be the answer.”

Gertrude Stein

"Near East or Chicago A Description"
Useful Knowledge (1928)

Question

“Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.”

Gertrude Stein

This phrase was used as the title of a work published in 1931, but was originally used in Ch. LXII of A Novel of Thank You, written in 1925-1926, but not published until 1958 by the Yale University Press

Friendship , Flowers

“The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.”

Gertrude Stein

Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (1952) Pt. 1 (written 1940-1943)

Bad luck

“One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.”

Gertrude Stein

Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (22 May 1925), published in Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up (1945)

Pleasure

“To know to know to love her so.
Four saints prepare for saints.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Love

“Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Money , People , Dogs , Time

“The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 8

Business , Nature

“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, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 2

Country

“Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.”

Gertrude Stein

"Miss Furr and Miss Skeene"
This story about two lesbians, written in 1911, and published in Vanity Fair magazine in July 1923, is considered to be the origin of the use of the term "gay" for "homosexual", though it was not used in this sense in the story.
Geography and Plays (1922)

Learning , Time

“I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Gertrude Stein

"Sacred Emily"
This statement, written in 1913 and first published in Geography and Plays, is thought to have originally been inspired by the work of the artist Sir Francis Rose; a painting of his was in her Paris drawing-room.
See also the Wikipedia article: Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose
Nigel Rees explains the phrase thus: "The poem 'Sacred Emily' by Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) is well-nigh impenetrable to the average reader but somehow it has managed to give a format phrase to the language. If something is incapable of explanation, one says, for example, 'a cloud is a cloud is a cloud.' What Stein wrote, however, is frequently misunderstood. She did not say 'A rose is a rose is a rose,' as she might well have done, but 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose' (i.e. no indefinite article at the start and three not two repetitions.) The Rose in question was not a flower but an allusion to the English painter, Sir Francis Rose, 'whom she and I regarded' wrote Constantine Fitzgibbon, 'as the peer of Matisse and Picasso, and whose paintings — or at least painting — hung in her Paris drawing-room while a Gauguin was relegated to the lavatory.'" - Sayings of the Century, page 91
Geography and Plays (1922)

“There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.”

Gertrude Stein book Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 12

Life , Art

“A master-piece … may be unwelcome but it is never dull.”

Gertrude Stein

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

“Romance is everything.”

Gertrude Stein

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Useful Knowledge (1928)