Quotes from Gertrude Stein

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

Supposing everyone lived at one time what would they say. They would observe that stringing string beans is universal.

The difference between saints, forget-me-nots, and mountains, have to, have to, have to at a time.

The subject matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art is to make life better.

To know what one knows is frightening to live what one lives is soothing and though everybody likes to be frightened what they really have to have is soothing.

There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.

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.

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

I am I because my little dog knows me.

I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing

If you can do it then why do it?

When I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, How can I combine career and family?

Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

There is no there there.

A FEATHER. A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

It is very easy to love alone.