Best Quotes by Gertrude Stein (Top 10)
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We are always the same age inside.
Gertrude Stein
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It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
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Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Gertrude Stein
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Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein
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You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Gertrude Stein
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Let me listen to me and not to them.
Gertrude Stein
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I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.
Gertrude Stein
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America is my country and Paris is my hometown.
Gertrude Stein
More Gertrude Stein Quotes
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When you get there, there isn't any there there.
Gertrude Stein
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You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!
Gertrude Stein
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There is no there there.
Gertrude Stein
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You have to know what you want to get it.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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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.
Gertrude Stein
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A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
Gertrude Stein
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Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
Gertrude Stein
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It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.
Gertrude Stein
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She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
Gertrude Stein
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If you can do it then why do it?
Gertrude Stein
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An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work
Gertrude Stein
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A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
Gertrude Stein
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You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.
Gertrude Stein
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One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
Gertrude Stein
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I am I because my little dog knows me.
Gertrude Stein
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Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
Gertrude Stein
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What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
Gertrude Stein
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It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.
Gertrude Stein
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The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
Gertrude Stein
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Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.
Gertrude Stein
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Money is always there but the pockets change.
Gertrude Stein
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I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
Gertrude Stein
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Silent gratitude isn't very much to anyone.
Gertrude Stein
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The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.
Gertrude Stein
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The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
Gertrude Stein
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Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.
Gertrude Stein
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Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
Gertrude Stein
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When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.
Gertrude Stein
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The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
Gertrude Stein
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If things happen all the time you are never nervous. It is when they are not happening that you are nervous.
Gertrude Stein
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In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes American what it is.
Gertrude Stein
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Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others. Melanctha Herbert always loved too hard and much too often. She was always full with mystery and subtle movements and denials and vague distrusts and complicated disillusions. Then Melanctha would be sudden and impulsive and unbounded in some faith, and then she would suffer and be strong in her repression. Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble.
Gertrude Stein