Quotes by
Gertrude Stein |
1874-1946 , American writer
American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. She moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the rest of her life. Her book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written in the voice of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner, is her best known work.
She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald , would meet.
| 39 quotes | 3,368 visits |
Quotations
| • | Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. 4 |
| • | One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure. 2 |
| • | – Alice, Alice, what is the answer? – There is no answer. – Well, then, what is the question? (coming out of a coma to her partner Alice Toklas –the last words before her death) 1 |
| • | I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed. 1 |
| • | The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic. 1 |
| • | I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich. 1 |
| • | All the world knows how to cry but not all the world knows how to sigh. Sighing is extra. 1 |
| • | All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation... You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death. 1 |
| • | It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken. 1 |
| • | 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. 1 |
| • | The composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented. 1 |
| • | I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. 1 |
| • | Start all over again and this time, concentrate. (to a young Ernest Hemingway) 1 |
| • | Politeness does not interfere with facts, politeness is just another fact. 1 |
| • | One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come. 1 |
| • | And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made. 1 |
| • | So many words to use. Oh do not say that words have a use. 1 |
| • | Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone. 1 |
| • | I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it 1 |
| • | Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. 1 |
| • | How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love. 1 |
| • | Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life. 1 |
| • | The artist works by locating the world in himself. 1 |
| • | A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. 1 |
| • | If you can do it then why do it? 1 |
| • | Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous. 1 |
| • | America is my country, and Paris is my home town. 1 |
| • | I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. 1 |
| • | Let me listen to me and not to them. 1 |
| • | Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. 1 |
| • | In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. 1 |
| • | Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense 1 |
| • | It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. 1 |
| • | We are always the same age inside. 1 |
| • | One must dare to be happy. 1 |
| • | There is no there there. (perhaps a reference to her childhood home of Oakland, that had been razed) 1 |
| • | Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. (meaning: things are what they are) 1 |
Quotes in Verse
| • | There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's your answer. 1 |
| • | You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance 1 |
