Quotes from book
The Making of Americans

The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress is a modernist novel by Gertrude Stein. The novel traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families. Stein also includes frequent metafictional meditations on the process of writing the text that periodically overtake the main narrative.


Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein photo
Gertrude Stein photo

“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.”

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.

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