Quotes by
Gertrude Stein |
1874-1946 , American writer
American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. She moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the rest of her life. Her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner, is her best known work.
She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald , would meet.
| 39 quotes | 2,930 visits |
Quotations
| • | Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. 3 |
| • | Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. (meaning: things are what they are) |
| • | There is no there there. (perhaps a reference to her childhood home of Oakland, that had been razed) |
| • | One must dare to be happy. |
| • | We are always the same age inside. |
| • | It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. |
| • | Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense |
| • | In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. |
| • | Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. |
| • | Let me listen to me and not to them. |
| • | I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. |
| • | America is my country, and Paris is my home town. |
| • | Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous. |
| • | If you can do it then why do it? |
| • | A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. |
| • | The artist works by locating the world in himself. |
| • | Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life. |
| • | How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love. |
| • | Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. |
| • | I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it |
| • | Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone. |
| • | So many words to use. Oh do not say that words have a use. |
| • | And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made. |
| • | One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come. |
| • | Politeness does not interfere with facts, politeness is just another fact. |
| • | Start all over again and this time, concentrate. (to a young Ernest Hemingway) |
| • | I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. |
| • | The composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented. |
| • | It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before. |
| • | It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken. |
| • | One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure. |
| • | All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death. |
| • | All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra. |
| • | I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich. |
| • | The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic. |
| • | I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed. |
| • | – Alice, Alice, what is the answer? – There is no answer. – Well, then, what is the question? (coming out of a coma to her partner Alice Toklas –the last words before her death) |
Quotes in Verse
| • | You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance |
| • | There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's your answer. |
