Gertrude Stein

“Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. ”

“I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. ”

“Remarks are not literature.”

“There ain't no answer.There ain't gonna be any answer.There never has been an answer.There's your answer.”

“We are always the same age inside. ”

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

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

“There is no there there.”

“It is a very strange feeling when one is loving a clock that is to every one of your class of living an ugly and a foolish one and one really likes such a thing and likes it very much and liking it is a serious thing, or one likes a colored handkerchief that is very gay and every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing and thinks you like it because it is a funny thing to like it and you like it with a serious feeling, or you like eating something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing.”

“Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.”

“Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous”

“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.”

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

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

“One must dare to be happy. ”

“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?”

“There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. ”

“Affectations can be dangerous.”

“War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.”

“You have to know what you want to get it.”

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”

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

“For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”

“You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle. ”

“Bailing the center of a spot and not having an embankment is not the only way to flirt. So soon, so left without a spoon, so august and so strange and taller than every other, it is not astonishing that someone is older.”

“it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.”

“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”

“The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one's living and has to fear want and disease and death....The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not.~ September, 1943”

“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.”

“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.”

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Let me listen to me and not to them.”

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

“If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.”

“If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.”