Gertrude Stein citations

Page 2

“You have to know what you want to get it.”

“America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be.”

“You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.”

“You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!”

“You are all a lost generation.”

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”

“I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing”

“When I go around and speak on campuses,
I still don't get young men standing up and saying,
How can I combine career and family?”

“She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.”

“If you can do it then why do it?”

“Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.”

“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.”

“If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.”

“If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.”

“A FEATHER.

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.”

“This is the place of places and and it is here.”

“I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.”

“A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.”

“What is the answer?" [ I was silent ] "In that case, what is the question?”

“If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.”

“You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.”

“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.”

“It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.”

“A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”

“In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.”

“Pigeons on the grass alas.
Pigeons on the grass alas.
Short longer grass short longer longer shorter yellow grass.
Pigeons large pigeons on the shorter longer yellow grass alas pigeons on the grass.”

“But now well democracy has shown us that what is evil are the grosses têtes, the big heads, all big heads are greedy for money and power, they are ambitious that is the reason they are big heads and so they are at the head of the government and the result is misery for the people. They talk about cutting off the heads of the grosses têtes but now we know that there will be other grosses têtes and the will be all the same.”

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

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