Gertrude Stein Quotes (114 Quotes)

Romance is everything.

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

To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.

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

Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.

I rarely believe anything, because at the time of believing I am not really there to believe.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

A house in the country is not the same as a country house.

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.

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

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

We are always the same age inside.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

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?'

There is no such thing as being good to your wife.

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.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.

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

Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.

There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.

Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.

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.1943

Let me listen to me and not to them.

A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

Let me listen to me and not them.

It is very easy to love alone.

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

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.