Quotes from Gertrude Stein

This is the place of places and and it is here.

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.

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

The artist works by locating the world in himself

If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.

To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love.

Affectations can be dangerous.

Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life

what good are roots if you can't take them with you

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.

I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.

I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.

Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.

Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one.

Romance is everything.

There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.

A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining.

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

I write for myself and strangers.