Gertrude Stein > Quotes

“We are always the same age inside. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“One must dare to be happy. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“You look ridiculous if you dance
You look ridiculous if you don't dance
So you might as well
dance.”
― Gertrude Stein, Three Lives

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
― Gertrude Stein

“In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...

It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
― Gertrude Stein

“There ain't no answer.
There ain't gonna be any answer.
There never has been an answer.
There's your answer.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup”
― Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings

“Let me listen to me and not to them.”
― Gertrude Stein

“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.”
― gertrude stein

“I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“You attract what you need like a lover”
― Gertrude Stein

“Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?”
― Gertrude Stein

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”
― Gertrude Stein

“Whenever you get there, there is no there there.”
― Gertrude Stein

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“You have to know what you want to get it.”
― Gertrude Stein

“If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”
― Gertrude Stein

“You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle. ”
― Gertrude Stein

“America is my country, and Paris is my home town.”
― Gertrude Stein

“You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!”
― Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

“You are all a lost generation.”
― Gertrude Stein

“The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one's living and has to fear want and disease and death....The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.

~ September, 1943”
― Gertrude Stein

“Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous”
― Gertrude Stein

“After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.”
― Gertrude Stein, Paris France

“It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.”
― Gertrude Stein