Gertrude Stein Quotes

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.

Let me listen to me and not to them May I be very well and happy May I be whichever they can thrive Or just may they not. They do not think not only only But always with prefer And therefore I like what is mine For which not only willing but willingly Because which it matters. They find it one in union. In union there is strength.

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.

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

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

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

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

twenty-five years run around so quickly but thirty one years is a long time.

One must dare to be happy

I have lived half of my life in Paris, not the half the made me but the half in which I made what I made.

Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.

The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.

There are many that I know and I know it. They are many that I know and they know it. They are all of them themselves and they repeat it and I hear it. Always I listen to it. Slowly I come to understand it. Many years I listened and did not know it. I heard it, I understood it some, I did not know I heard it. They repeat themselves now and I listen to it. Every way that they do it now I hear it. Now each time very slowly I come to understand it. Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.

When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.

You are all a lost generation.