Gertrude Stein Quotes
it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.
If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
But the problem is that 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?'
Writer or painter god-parents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship.
A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.
Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.
Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.
The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.
Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.
Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.
Once more I can climb about and remind you that a woman in this epoch does the important literary thinking.
... when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war.
One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.
It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.
How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.
This is the real thing of disillusion that no one, not any one really is believing, seeing, understanding, thinking anything as you are thinking, believing, seeing, understanding such a thing.
The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.
To complicate things in new ways, that is really very easy; but to see things in new ways, that is difficult and that is why genius is so rare.
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.
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.
I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication. Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.
The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.
A great deal of beauty is rapture. A circle is a necessity. Otherwise you would see no one. We each have our circle.
