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Gertrude Stein Quotes

1874–1946 United States

Gertrude Stein (3 February 1874 – 27 July 1946) was an American expatriate writer, poet, feminist, and playwright, who lived most of her life in Europe. She is remembered for her "flow-of-thought" and sometimes "cyclical" or "circular" manner of expressing things.

United States
20th-century poets
Authors
Autobiographers
Deaths

Also known as: Stein, Gertrude, Everybody’s Autobiography

Random Gertrude Stein quote

104 quotes

I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

"What is the answer?" [ I was silent ] "In that case, what is the question?"

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.

Libretto for the opera The Mother Of Us All by Virgil Thomson (1947)

One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

Everyone has to make up their mind if money is money or money isn't money and sooner or later they always do decide that money is money.

Everybody's Autobiography (1937)

The two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

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 tills it.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes (1952)

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

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1936)

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Geography and Plays (1922)

Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

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.

How Writing Is Written: Previously Uncollected Writings, vol.II (1974)

To know to know to love her so.
Four saints prepare for saints.

Operas and Plays (1932)

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1923)

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.

Wars I Have Seen (1945)

If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Gertrude Stein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.