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Gertrude Stein

126 quotes

“Politeness does not interfere with facts, politeness is just another fact.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It often makes me know that as a cousin of mine once said about money, money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Statement about World War II (written in 1943), p. 77
“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of enemies is awful it makes one stop remembering eternity and the fear of death. That is what enemies are. Possessions are the same as enemies only less so, they too make one forget eternity and the fear of death.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don’t envisage collectivism. There is no such animal, it is always individualism, sometimes the rest vote and sometimes they do not, and if they do they do and if they do not they do not.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Answer to Eugene Jolas," Transition (March 1932)
“A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Superstitions of Fred Anneday, Annday, Anday; a Novel of Real Life" (1935)
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How Writing is Written," Choate Literary Magazine (February 1935)
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Capital and Capitals of the United States of America," New York Herald Tribune (9 March 1935)
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Situation in American Writing," Partisan Review (Summer 1939)
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: How to Write (1931), Ch. 4: A Grammarian [Dover, 1975, ] p. 109
“When General Osborne came to see me just after the victory, he asked me what I thought should be done to educate the Germans. I said there is only one thing to be done and that is to teach them disobedience, as long as they are obedient so long sooner or later they will be ordered about by a bad man and there will be trouble. Teach them disobedience, I said, make every German child know that it is its duty at least once a day to do its good deed and not believe something its father or its teacher tells them, confuse their minds, get their minds confused and perhaps then they will be disobedient and the world will be at peace. The obedient peoples go to war, disobedient people like peace, that is the reason that Italy did not really become a good Axis, the people were not obedient enough, the Japs and the Germans are the only really obedient people on earth and see what happens, teach them disobedience, confuse their minds, teach them disobedience, and the world can be peaceful. General Osborne shook his head sadly, you'll never make the heads of an army understand that.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Off we all went to see Germany. In: LIFE Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 6, August 6, 1945, S.56, ISSN 0024-3019. google books
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of the inner and outer reality. She has reproduced simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should never be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry and prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation. A creator who creates, who is not an academician, who is not someone who studies in a school where the rules are already known, and of course being known they no longer exist, a creator then who creates is necessarily of his generation. His generation lives in its contemporary way but they only live in it. In art, in literature, in the theatre, in short in everything that does not contribute to their immediate comfort they live in the preceding generation.”
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said by 1946 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source