Gertrude Stein Quotes - Page 5

A diary means yes indeed.

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.

I really do know that it can be done and if it can be done why do it...

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

War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.

When you earn it and spend it you do know the difference between three dollars and a million dollars, but when you say it and vote it, it all sounds the same.

A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything. Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.

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

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

We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me why American men think that success is everything when they know that eighty percent of them are not going to succeed more than to just keep going and why if they are not why do they not keep on being interested in the things that interested them when they were college men and why American men different from English men do not get more interesting as they get older.

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts.

There are so many ways of earning a living and most of them are failures.

A creator is so completely contemporary that he has the appearance of being ahead of his generation.

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

How do you like what you have. This is a question that anybody can ask anybody. Ask it.

How likely are definitions to be pleasurable.

I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.

I could never be one of two I could never be two in one as married couples do and can, I am but one all one, one and all one, and so I have never been married to any one.

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.

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

Honesty is a selfish virtue. Yes I am honest enough.

Romance is everything.

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

If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.

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.