Quotes from Gertrude Stein

Poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of everything.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.

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

A diary means yes indeed.

If you can do it then why do it?

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.

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.

The central theme of the novel is that they were glad to see each other.

One must either accept some theory or else believe one's own instinct or follow the world's opinion.

She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.

Nothing has happened today except kindness.

I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.

That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.

In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.

Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

I understand you undertake to overthrow my undertaking.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.

Let me listen to me and not to them.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.