Gertrude Stein citations (160 citations, Page 3)

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)

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

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

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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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“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.”

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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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

"The Situation in American Writing," Partisan Review (Summer 1939)
How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)