Gertrude Stein: Thing

“Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.”

Gertrude Stein

Source: Everybody’s Autobiography (1937), Ch. 4
Context: Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear. Now this is a simple thing that anybody who has ever argued or quarreled knows perfectly well is a simple thing, only when they read it they do not understand it because they do not see that understanding and believing are not the same thing.

“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”

Gertrude Stein

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.”

Gertrude Stein

“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”

Gertrude Stein

"How Writing is Written," Choate Literary Magazine (February 1935)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

People , Art , Literature

“Human beings are interested in two things. They are interested in the reality and interested in telling about it.”

Gertrude Stein

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

Reality

“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

“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 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)

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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