Gertrude Stein Quotes

American author (1874–1946)

Gertrude Stein (3 February 1874 – 27 July 1946) was an American expatriate writer, poet, feminist, and playwright, who lived most of her life in Europe. She is remembered for her "flow-of-thought" and sometimes "cyclical" or "circular" manner of expressing things.

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Alternative Names: Gertruda Stein • Gertruda Staĭn

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Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

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.

A rose is a rose is a rose.

Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of the inner and outer reality. She has reproduced simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should never be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry or prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry and prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or inner reality.

A master-piece … may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

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.

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

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

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 thing that is most interesting about government servants is that they believe what they are supposed to believe, they really do believe what they are supposed to believe.

Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

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

Alice Toklas' father had almost once had an oil well they dug and dug but naturally the oil did not gush, naturally not these things never do happen to any one one knows, if it could happen to them you would not be very likely to know them most naturally not.