Quotes from Gertrude Stein

A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer

Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.

I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.

I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.

Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet

nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen.

they do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it.

After a while 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, he said.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.

A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.

She says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done.

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before

Remarks are not literature.

What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. - A substance in a cushion

A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.

A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot. - Red roses.

Everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.

A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. (on Ezra Pound)

Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving.

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

The seam in between is fenceless.

One must dare to be happy

There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.