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The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

— Gertrude Stein Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

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More quotes by Gertrude Stein

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.

What Is English Literature? (1935)

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

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

Reflections on the Atom Bomb (1946)

The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting

Paris France (1940)

All Gertrude Stein quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Gertrude Stein (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.