Gertrude Stein (1874 – 1946)
American expatriate writer, poet, feminist, and playwright, who lived most of her life in Europe.
Suppose no one asked a question, what would be the answer.
Remarks are not literature.
Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just... I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.
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.
Communists are people who fancied that they had an unhappy childhood.
As there was never any question there was never any answer.
Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.
Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.
There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.
Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass.
To know to know to love her so.
Four saints prepare for saints.
Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.
Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you.
When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.
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.
Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening.
Would I if I could by pushing a button would I kill five thousand Chinamen if I could save my brother from anything. Well I was very fond of my brother and I could completely imagine his suffering and I replied that five thousand Chinamen were something I could not imagine and so it was not interesting.
One has to remember that about imagination, that is when the world gets dull when everybody does not know what they can or what they cannot really imagine.