Quotessence
Home / Authors / Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllLiteratureIfsKnowsDoeMenThinkingWayWritingPeopleWarWorldDifferencesRealTwoArtLittlesInterestingMoneyNaturalWant

Famous Gertrude Stein Quotes

“it is a surprising thing that the largest city in the world should have a population as gentle and pleasant and intimate and considerate and comforting as a little bit of a place where everybody knows everybody and everything, but astonishing or not it is perfectly true and the inhabitants of New York are just like that, and they are like that and this thing is a delightful, natural and gentle and sweet and comforting thing.”

KnowsWorldShouldLittlesBitsNaturalCitiesNew YorkSweetLittle BitShould HavePopulationGentleIntimatePleasantSurprisingDelightfulComfortingAstonishingConsiderateCities In The WorldSurprising Things
Book:How Writing Is Written
Create image

“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”

WorldFirstsWarDonePleasureHistoryExtraordinaryWar Of The WorldsCivil WarWorld War ICoincidenceRepetitionSecond World WarFirst World WarBalkansSpanish Civil War
Book:Wars I have seen
Create image

“Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dominated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.”

ThinkingWorldHumansDifferencesHuman BeingsPerfectStreetsExampleSourceNewspapersJournalismThoughtfulThinkerArtificialTypicalSuperficialMain Street
Author:Gertrude Stein
Create image

“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 was 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.”

IfsKnowsWorldWellsDoeRememberSufferingImaginationInterestingFiveImagineBrotherThousandMy BrotherDullIf I CouldPushingButtons
Author:Gertrude Stein
Create image

“There is no passion more dominant and instinctive in the human spirit than the need of the country to which one belongs.... The time comes when nothing in the world is so important as a breath of one's own particular climate. If it were one's last penny it would be used for that return passage.”

IfsWorldNeedsHumansImportantCountryWould BeLastsUsedSpiritPassionParticularReturnBreathsClimateNationalismPassagesDominantHuman SpiritPenniesHomesickness
Book:Three Lives
Create image

“There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.”

PeopleWorldHumansImportantFormCoursesDifferencesHuman BeingsEssentialsImportanceEqualityCeaseCombination
Book:A primer for the gradual understanding of Gertrude Stein
Create image

“Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?”

PeopleIfsWorldMindWellsKindStillsCertainMy FriendsPoundsVillageIntuitiveExplainingCozyStill LifeExplaining Things
Author:Gertrude Stein
Create image

“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.”

WorldFeelsHas BeensWarCountryStatesAgeAmericaMotherBornUnitedUnited StatesCenturyCivilizationCivil WarTwentieth Century
Book:How Writing Is Written
Create image