Quotes from Gertrude Stein

It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

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

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

Pigeons on the grass alas.

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.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens.

It is funny 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.

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.

If nobody had to die how would there be room enough for any of us who now live to have lived.

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

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.

I just tell you, and though I don't sound like it I've got plenty of sense, there ain't any answer, there ain't going to be any answer, there never has been any answer, that's the answer.

Believe me for meat and for myself.

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

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

Money is always there, but the pockets change.

Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone.

The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

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.

The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.