Gertrude Stein Literature Quotations

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer.

There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything.

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family.

Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

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

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.

I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.

An audience is always warming but it must never be necessary to your work.

Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation.

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.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

I have declared that patience is never more than patient. I too have declared, that I who am not patient am patient.

Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.

Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.

Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.

Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.

The nineteenth century was completely lacking in logic, it had cosmic terms and hopes, and aspirations, and discoveries, and ideals but it had no logic.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

It is so friendly so simply friendly and though inevitable not a sadness and though occurring not a shock.

In France one must adapt oneself to the fragrance of a urinal.

There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more.

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.

The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

Generally speaking, everyone is more interesting doing nothing than doing anything.

It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for the future, none at all. It certainly is extraordinary, but it is certainly true.

Remarks are not literature.

Remarks aren't literature.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite.

A diary means yes indeed.