Gertrude Stein Quotes

“It is very easy to love alone.”
― Gertrude Stein

“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.”
― Gertrude Stein, Selected Operas and Plays

“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.”
― Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

“Gertrude’s remedy for her mood swings was to print up hundreds of black-bordered calling cards embossed with the single word “Woe,” which she handed out gaily declaring, “Woe is me.”
― Ross Wetzsteon, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia 1910-1960

“There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.”
― Gertrude Stein, Ida

“I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”
― Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

“You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said. "It's that simple. No one who is not very rich can do both. Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“Die Judenfrage,' it used to be called, even by Jews. 'The Jewish Question.' I find I quite like this interrogative formulation, since the question—as Gertrude Stein once famously if terminally put it—may be more absorbing than the answer. Of course one is flirting with calamity in phrasing things this way, as I learned in school when the Irish question was discussed by some masters as the Irish 'problem.' Again, the word 'solution' can be as neutral as the words 'question' or 'problem,' but once one has defined a people or a nation as such, the search for a resolution can become a yearning for the conclusive. Endlösung: the final solution.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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,”
― Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein

“My wife and I had called on Miss Stein, and she and the friend who lived with her had been very cordial and friendly and we had loved the big studio with the great paintings. I t was like one of the best rooms in the finest museum except there was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, yellow plums or wild raspberries.
Miss Stein was very big but not tall and was heavily built like a peasant woman. She had beautiful eyes and a strong German-Jewish face that also could have been Friulano and she reminded me of a northern I talian peasant woman with her clothes, her mobile face and her lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair which she wore put up in the same way she had probably worn it in college. She talked all the time and at first it was about people and places.
Her companion had a very pleasant voice, was small, very dark, with her hair cut like Joan of Arc in the Boutet de Monvel illustrations and had a very hooked nose. She was working on a piece of needlepoint when we first met them and she worked on this and saw to the food and drink and talked to my wife. She made one conversation and listened to two and often interrupted the one she was not making. Afterwards she explained to me that she always talked to the wives. The wives, my wife and I felt, were tolerated. But we liked Miss Stein and her friend, although the friend was frightening. The paintings and the cakes and the eau-de-vie were truly wonderful. They seemed to like us too and treated us as though we were very good, well-mannered and promising children and I felt that they forgave us for being in love and being married - time would fix that - and when my wife invited them to tea, they accepted.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.”
― Gertrude Stein

“replacing a casual aquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“There is no use in a smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual.

Why should that which is uneven, that which is resumed, that which is tolerable why should all this resemble a smell, a thing is there, it whistles, it is not narrower, why is there no obligation to stay away and yet courage, courage is everywhere and the best remains to stay.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“What're you reading?"
"Gertrude Stein."
I shook my head. I'd never heard of her.
"The poet?" he asked. "You know, 'A rose is a rose is a rose'?"
I shook my head again.
"During the last year of her life, my mother became obsessed with her," Grant said. "She'd spent most of her life reading the Victorian poets, and when she found Gertrude Stein, she told me she was a comfort."
"What does she mean, 'A rose is a rose is a rose'?" I asked. Snapping the biology book shut, I was confronted with the skeleton of a human body. I tapped the empty eye socket.
"That things just are what they are," he said.
" 'A rose is a rose.' "
" 'Is a rose,' " he finished, smiling faintly.
I thought about all the roses in the garden below, their varying shades of color and youth. "Except when it's yellow," I said. "Or red, or pink, or unopened, or dying."
"That's what I've always thought," said Grant. "But I'm giving Ms. Stein the opportunity to convince me.”
― Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers

“After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high. Anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of looks, their kind of thinking, their subtlety and their stupidity, and their eating and their drinking and their language.”
― Gertrude Stein

“What is a nail. A nail is unison.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“Inaccrochable - A picture a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either. -said by Gertrude Stein”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition

“There is not much future in men being friends with a great woman although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

“And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.”
― Kate Zambreno

“A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged.”
― Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

“His pictures of this region summarize the soulful emptiness of a country where, as Gertrude Stein observed, 'there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.”
― Sarah Vowell, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

“Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, 'Alice, Alice, what is the answer?' Her companion replied, 'There is no answer.' Gertrude Stein continued, 'Well, then, what is the question?' and fell back dead.”
― Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

“Gertrude Stein to Margaret Craven:
Every writer must have common sense. He must be sensitive and serious. But he must not grow solemn. He must not listen to himself. If he does, he might as well be under a tombstone. When he takes himself solemnly, he has no more to say. Yet he must despise nothing, not even solemn people. They are part of life and it's his job to write about life.
Be direct. Indirectness ruins good writing. There is inner confusion in the world today and because of it people are turning back to old standards like children to their mothers. This makes indirect writing.
A writer must preserve a balance between sensitivity and vitality. Commercial writers are vital but not sensitive. Trying to keep this balance is always hard. It is the whole job of living.
When one writes a thing---when you discover and then put it down, which is the essence of discovering it---one is done with it. What people get out of it is none of the writer's business.
Every writer is self-conscious. It's one reason he is a writer and he is lonely. If you know three writers in a lifetime, that is a great many.”
― Margaret Craven, Again Calls the Owl

“A word is a word is another word more beautiful because of the former and the next and the circle and sun they create.”
― Meia Geddes

“If someone sent you a suicide note," Gertrude said. "You'd correct the spelling and send it back to them."
"They'd at least die grammatically," said Alice.”
― Samuel M. Steward, The Caravaggio Shawl

“Gertrude carefully replaced the telephone in its cradle. She looked at Alice and said, "Guess who arrove in Paris three days ago."
"Arrived, Lovey," said Alice.
"I prefer arrove," said Gertrude. "It sounds more past tense than arrived. Besides, if you can say arise and arose why not arrive and arrove."
"For all the best possible reasons," said Alice, putting down the red polishing cloth she was holding, and laying the small silver-plated gun on top of it. "Logic does not apply to language. But tell me who arrove.”
― Samuel M. Steward, The Caravaggio Shawl

“One final note on the biogeographic divisions of the world. The very feature that stunned Buffon and his contemporaries, and eventually led to the revolutionary insights that would define the field of biogeography—the evolutionary distinctiveness of different regions—is now waning in the face of the geographic and ecological advance of one species: our own. Few taxa and regions across the globe have escaped the biotic homogenization caused by humanity. Regional biotas are becoming increasingly similar as a result of two pervasive, anthropogenic activities—extinctions of endemic species and species introductions. In fact, these two homogenizing effects of humanity are interrelated, with species introductions being one of the major causes of extinctions of endemic species.
Recall Gertrude Stein’s lament over the loss in distinctiveness of place—that “there is no there, there.” Tragically, this is becoming the sobering reality for the increasingly homogenized biosphere. While we may not be suffering from the muted, “ Silent Spring ” that Rachel Carson warned us about in 1962, the monotonous cacophony of coquís (frogs native to Puerto Rico) and cicada in exotic lands as isolated as Hawaii now drown out the euphonious, more subtle calls of honeycreepers and other birds native to the islands.”
― Mark V Lomolino, Biogeography: A Very Short Introduction