Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Gertrude Stein Writer

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: United States
  • Born: Feb 3, 1874
  • Died: Jul 27, 1946

Gertrude Stein was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays. Born in West Allegheny, Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art.

In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream attention.

This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.

We are always the same age inside.

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

What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country.

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

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

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

Nature is commonplace. Imitation is more interesting.

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.

Romance is everything.

Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

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

It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

It is very easy to love alone.

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.

It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

History takes time. History makes memory.

I know what Germans are. They are a funny people. They are always choosing someone to lead them in a direction which they do not want to go.

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

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

It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them.

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

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.