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Gertrude Stein citations
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Gertrude Stein, née le 3 février 1874 à Allegheny West en Pennsylvanie et morte le 27 juillet 1946 à l'hôpital américain de Neuilly-sur-Seine près de Paris, est une poétesse, écrivaine, dramaturge et féministe américaine. Elle passa la majeure partie de sa vie en France et fut un catalyseur dans le développement de la littérature et de l'art moderne. Par sa collection personnelle et par ses livres, elle contribua à la diffusion du cubisme et plus particulièrement de l'œuvre de Picasso, de Matisse et de Cézanne. Wikipedia  

✵ 3. février 1874 – 27. juillet 1946   •   Autres noms Gertruda Steinová, Gertruda Stein
Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein: 160   citations 0   J'aime

Gertrude Stein: Citations en anglais

“I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.”

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Gertrude Stein

As quoted in Red Rabbit : A novel (2002) by Tom Clancy, p. 153

“Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.”

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Gertrude Stein livre The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

How to Write (1931), Ch. 4: A Grammarian [Dover, 1975, ISBN 0-486-23144-5] p. 109

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.”

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Gertrude Stein livre The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”

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Gertrude Stein livre The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

“Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.”

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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)

“It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.”

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Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

Quoted by Frederic Prokosch in Voices: A Memoir (1983)

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”

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Gertrude Stein

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting”

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Gertrude Stein livre Paris France

Source: Paris France (1940), p. 107

“I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.”

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Gertrude Stein livre The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans (1925)

“A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.”

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Gertrude Stein

Statement about World War II (written in 1943), p. 77
Wars I Have Seen (1945)

“It bothers a lot of people, but like you said, it's nobody's business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it.”

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Gertrude Stein

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)

“The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

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Gertrude Stein

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923). First published in Vanity Fair.

“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.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover.
A at most.
Saint saint a saint.”

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Gertrude Stein

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

“After all, human beings are like that. When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone.”

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Gertrude Stein livre Paris France

Paris France (1940)

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