Gertrude Stein Quotes

Just before she Gertrude Stein died she asked, `What is the answer?' No answer came. She laughed and said, `In that case, what is the question?

Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.

A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.

They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra.

Poetry is I say essentially a vocabulary just as prose is essentially not. And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. So that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose.

If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles.

Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup

So many words to use. Oh do not say that words have a use.

We are always the same age inside.

A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover. A at most. Saint saint a saint.

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

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.

Act so that there is no use in a center.