Quotes from Gertrude Stein

J'aime vivre au milieu de tant de gens et être si seule avec ma langue et moi-même.

Gertrude Stein has never ceased to be thankful to her mother for neither forgetting or forgiving. Imagine, she has said to me, if my mother had forgiven her sister-in-law and my father had gone into business with my uncle and we had lived and been brought up in New York, imagine, she says, how horrible. We would have been rich instead of reasonably poor but imagine how horrible to have been brought up in New York. I as a californian can very thoroughly sympathise.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

I have gone on beginning...

One of the pleasantest things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

was born in San Francisco, California. I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it. My mother's father was a pioneer, he came to California in '49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music. She was a pupil of Clara Schumann's father. My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.

Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it.

You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don't dance. So you might as well dance.

the composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented.

Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it.

I am I because my little dog knows me. That does not prove anything about [me] it only proves something about the dog.

No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept.

Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And that is all as it should be.

What happened to-day, a narrative

I have so much inertia and so little initiative that very possibly if you had not kept me from taking my degree I would have, well, not taken to the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology and you don't know how little I like pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me.

She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success.

A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit.

Paris was where the twentieth century was.

I take back all the harsh things I said about your writing. It makes a picture and that is always good. But it is alright to learn to play Bach in writing too.

newer approaches to textual editing have been skeptical of the concept of an authoritative text, let alone an editor's ability to distinguish such a text among multiple versions.

There are many kinds of men and many kinds of women and each kind of them have a different feeling in them about the baby that was once all them.

a certain way of thinking, a way of loving, a way of having or not having pride inside them, a way of suffering, a way of eating, a way of drinking, a way of learning, a way of working, a way of beginning, a way of ending.

Don't worry as long as you worry.

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, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.