Gertrude Stein: Doe

Gertrude Stein was American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays. Explore interesting quotes on doe.
Gertrude Stein: 320   quotes 24   likes

“One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 3
Context: Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting.
One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

World , Imagination

“Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.”

Gertrude Stein book The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)
Context: There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it. Slowly I come to understand it. Many years I listened and did not know it. I heard it, I understood it some, I did not know I heard it. They repeat themselves now and I listen to it. Every way that they do it now I hear it. Now each time very slowly I come to understand it. Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.

History , Understanding

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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