Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Gertrude Stein.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny West neighborhood and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.
If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.
America is my country and Paris is my hometown.
The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.
I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?
A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.
It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.
It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.
Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population.
Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.
Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.
An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.
It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.
To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.
But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'
Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.
There is no there there.
Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
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.
Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.
Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
Romance is everything.
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.
The earth is the earth as a peasant sees it, the world is the world as a duchess sees it, and anyway a duchess would be nothing if the earth was not there as the peasant sees it.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Hemingway's remarks are not literature.
The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
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.
It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.
We are always the same age inside.
It is very easy to love alone.
A diary means yes indeed.
The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.
Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.
I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
History takes time. History makes memory.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.
It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping.
If you can do it then why do it?
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.
A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.