239 Quotes from Gertrude Stein. What is the answer? Sentences are made wonderfully one at a time. Who makes them. Nobody can make them because nobody can what ever they do see. All this makes sentences so clear I know how I like them. What is a sentence mostly what is a sentence. With them a sentence is with us about us all about us we will be willing with what a sentence is. A sentence is that they cannot be carefully there is a doubt about it. The great question is can you think a sentence. What is a sentence. He thought a sentence. Who calls him to come which he did. …What is a sentence. A sentence is a duplicate. An exact duplicate is depreciated. Why is a duplicated sentence not depreciated. Because it is a witness. No witnesses are without value. She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling. You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary! Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding any one. SUSIE ASADO Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. Susie Asado. Susie Asado which is a told tray sure. A lean on the shoe this means slips slips hers. Bailing the center of a spot and not having an embankment is not the only way to flirt. So soon, so left without a spoon, so august and so strange and taller than every other, it is not astonishing that someone is older. Let me repeat what history teaches. History teaches. A frontier is a division between countries. A history of a country is not a history of the changing of frontiers although many think so particularly those near the frontier the history of a country is why they like things which they have and which they do not exchange for other things for which they do not care. Oh grammar is so fine. The more you see how the country is the more you do not wonder why they shut the door. The women do in a way and yet if they did not it would be best. 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. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what any one would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is. The English language has been thrust upon Americans. And it is wrong. As static and immobile as are the English, just so ever-moving are Americans. Here is a huge country. Not a mere island. Naturally people move. And they need a moving language. A language that can interpret American life. Nouns and adjectives won't express American life. They are too weak, too immobile. But verbs, adverbs, prepositions and the like, ah, they are moving, just as Americans. Obviously we cannot suddenly junk the English language and adopt some other tongue. English is too connotative, too close to us. Our problem is to adapt the English language to American needs. To make it move with us Americans. That is the problem--to write things as they are, not as they seem. our aim must be not to explain things, but to write the thing itself, and thereby in itself be self explanatory. There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all. Everybody must like something and I like seeing painted pictures. I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences. She liked hats, she had the true french feeling about a hat, if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street the hat was not a success. Doing something is interesting to some, if not any one is remembering that that thing has just been done. Doing something is interesting to some if not any one is remembering that any one was one beginning doing some such thing. Doing something is interesting to some when those are remembering that every one has been doing that thing in having been shown that thing. Doing something is interesting to some when they are certain that all having been doing that thing have been completely dead and have not been forgotten. Doing something is interesting to some when they are certain that very many being dead were ones completely doing that thing. Doing things are interesting to some when some one is beginning to be finishing having done that thing. Doing something is interesting to some when they are remembering that every one could be doing that thing. Doing something is interesting to some when they are certain that every one should do that thing. There are many kinds of men and many kinds of women and each kind of them have a different feeling in them about the baby that was once all them. a certain way of thinking, a way of loving, a way of having or not having pride inside them, a way of suffering, a way of eating, a way of drinking, a way of learning, a way of working, a way of beginning, a way of ending. I love my love with a b because she is peculiar. It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before, I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything. It takes a heap of loafing to write a book. One of the pleasantest things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come. Familiarity does not breed contempt, anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. And that is all as it should be. 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. Nature and man are opposed in Spain. A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation. Cubism is a part of the daily life in Spain, it is in Spanish architecture. The architecture of other countries always follows the line of the landscape . . . but Spanish architecture always cuts the lines of the landscape. nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen. Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it. He [Picasso] used to say quite often, paper lasts quite as well as paint and after all it all ages together, why not, and he said further, after all, later, no one will see the picture, they will see the legend of the picture, the legend that the picture has created, then it makes no difference if the picture lasts or does not last. The painter does not conceive himself as existing in himself, he conceives himself as a reflection of the objects he has put into his pictures and he lives in the reflections of his pictures, a writer, a serious writer, conceives himself as existing by and in himself, he does not at all live in the reflection of his books, to write he must first of all exist in himself, but for a painter to be able to paint, the painting must first of all be done. One must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile. The automobile is the end of progress on the earth, it goes quicker but essentially the landscapes seen from an automobile are the same as the landscapes seen from a carriage, a train, a waggon or in walking. But the earth seen from an airplane is something else. So the twentieth century is not the same as the nineteenth century and it is very interesting knowing that Picasso has never seen the earth from an airplane, that being of the twentieth century he inevitably knew that the earth is not the same as in the nineteenth century, he knew it, he made it, inevitably he made it different and what he made is a thing that now all the world can see. They think they are interested about the atomic bomb but they really are not not any more than I am. Really not. They may be a little scared, I am not so scared, there is so much to be scared of so what is the use of bothering to be scared, and if you are not scared the atomic bomb is not interesting. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story. Coffee is a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or minutes, but a chance to be, like be yourself, and have a second cup Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same. So then I as a contemporary creating the composition in the beginning was groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again and then everything being alike then everything very simply everything was naturally simply different and so I as a contemporary was creating everything being alike was creating everything naturally being naturally simply different, everything being alike. This then was the period that brings me to the period of the beginning of 1914. Everything being alike everything naturally would be simply different and war came and everything being alike and everything being simply different brings everything being simply different brings it to romanticism. The one thing that everybody wants is to be free...not to be managed, threatened, directed, restrained, obliged, fearful, administered, they want none of these things they all want to feel free, the word discipline, and forbidden and investigated and imprisoned brings horror and fear into all hearts, they do not want to be afraid not more than is necessary in the ordinary business of living where one has to earn one's living and has to fear want and disease and death....The only thing that any one wants now is to be free, to be let alone, to live their life as they can, but not to be watched, controlled and scared, no no, not. I wish to remain to remember that stanzas go on newer approaches to textual editing have been skeptical of the concept of an authoritative text, let alone an editor’s ability to distinguish such a text among multiple versions. Sugar is not a vegetable. What is a nail. A nail is unison. Act so that there is no use in a center. A seal and matches and a swan and ivy and a suit. When is there some discharge when. There never is. A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm. In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling. Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting. replacing a casual aquaintance with an ordinary daughter does not make a son. A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot. - Red roses. Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time. Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain. What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it. - A substance in a cushion A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out. A bag which was left and not only taken but turned away was not found. The place was shown to be very like the last time. A piece was not exchanged, not a bit of it, a piece was left over. The rest was mismanaged. A virgin a whole virgin is judged made and so between curves and outlines and real seasons and more out glasses and a perfectly unprecedented arrangement between old ladies and mild colds there is no satin wood shining. There is no use in a smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual. Why should that which is uneven, that which is resumed, that which is tolerable why should all this resemble a smell, a thing is there, it whistles, it is not narrower, why is there no obligation to stay away and yet courage, courage is everywhere and the best remains to stay. A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even notwithstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even notwithstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain. Sure, she said, as Pablo once remarked, when you make a thing, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly, but those that do it after you they don't have to worry about making it and they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when the others make it. You look ridiculous if you dance. You look ridiculous if you don’t dance. So you might as well dance. A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist. ...they do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it. She always had a way of seeing through the surface of things, understanding people as they really were, not as they pretended to be. She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting. It was then that I said, and realized, that it is not what France gave you but what it did not take away from you that was important. The important thing, she insists, is that you must have deep down as the deepest thing in you a sense of equality. Then anybody will do anything for you. She answered him, there is nothing within you that fights itself and hitherto you have had the instinct to produce antagonism in others which stimulated you to attack. After a while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said. I was born in San Francisco, California. I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it. The process of creation is a journey of self-discovery, revealing not just what we can do, but who we truly are. Through the act of creating, we explore and uncover aspects of ourselves that may not be apparent in our everyday lives. In the long run, it is not what you do for your children but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings. Self-reliance and the ability to think critically are the greatest gifts you can give to them. I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do. To be truly creative, you must be free from all constraints, and this freedom comes from being true to yourself. The essence of creativity lies in breaking away from conventions and expressing your innermost thoughts and feelings without fear of judgment. In the long run, it is not who you know but what you do with what you know that makes a difference. Relationships and connections are important, but it is the application of knowledge and the actions you take that ultimately define your impact and success. No, she replied, you see I feel with my eyes and it does not make any difference to me what language I hear, I don’t hear a language, I hear tones of voice and rhythms, but with my eyes I see words and sentences and there is for me only one language and that is english. Life is a very complicated thing. The trouble with life is that it is very complicated. It involves many facets and layers, and it is not something that can be easily understood or neatly categorized. The complexity of life requires a deep engagement and thoughtful reflection. Art is not about creating something beautiful; it is about expressing something true. The value of art lies not in its aesthetic appeal, but in its ability to convey genuine emotion and insight. It is a reflection of the artist’s truth and their unique way of interpreting the world. The things that one remembers are important and the things that one forgets are equally important. Memory is selective and subjective, shaping our understanding of the past and influencing our actions in the present. What we choose to hold onto and what we let go of defines who we are. A work of art is not a thing but a way of looking at things. It is a method of expressing how you see the world. The creation itself is secondary to the vision behind it. What matters is not just the physical manifestation of art, but the perspective and insight that it brings to those who encounter it. She always says that americans can understand spaniards. That they are the only two western nations that can realize abstraction. That in americans it expresses itself b disembodiedness, in literature and machinery, in Spain by ritual so abstract that it does not connect itself with anything but ritual. I have so much inertia and so little initiative that very possibly if you had not kept me from taking my degree I would have, well, not taken to the practice of medicine, but at any rate to pathological psychology and you don’t know how little I like pathological psychology, and how all medicine bores me. Life is not real unless it is lived. To merely exist without engaging fully with the world around you, without embracing both the pain and the pleasure, is to miss the essence of what it means to be alive. Real life is experienced through action, through participation, through being present in each moment. It was an endless variety. And everybody came and no one made any difference. Gertrude Stein sat peacefully in a chair and those who could did the same, the rest stood. There were the friends who sat around the stove and talked and there were the endless strangers who came and went. My memory of it is very vivid. She says it is a good thing to have no sense of how it is done in the things that amuse you. You should have one absorbing occupation and as for the other things in life for full enjoyment you should only contemplate results. In this way you are bound to feel more about it than those who know a little of how it is done. You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery. The act of creation is not about achieving a specific outcome but about exploring the unknown, uncovering new truths, and experiencing the joy of finding something unexpected and beautiful. was born in San Francisco, California. I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it. My mother’s father was a pioneer, he came to California in ‘49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music. She was a pupil of Clara Schumann’s father. My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie. One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. I do not know if it would have been possible to have english be so all in all to me otherwise. And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write. No, I like living with so very many people and being all alone with english and myself. [Haweis] did however plead for commas. Gertrude Stein said commas were unnecessary, the sense should be intrinsic and not have to be explained by commas and otherwise commas are only a sign that one should pause and take breath but one should know of oneself when one wanted to pause and take breath. However, as she liked Haweis very much and he had given her a delightful painting for a fan, she gave him two commas. It must however be added that on rereading the manuscript she took the commas out. Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion should never be the cause, even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of an exact reproduction of either an outer or an inner reality. Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it. It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away. There was a man who was always writing to his daughter that she should not do things that were wrong that would disgrace him, she should not do such things and in every letter that he wrote to her he told her she should not do such things, that he was her father and was giving good moral advice to her and always he wrote to her in every letter that she should not do things that she should not do anything that would disgrace him. He wrote this in every letter he wrote to her, he wrote very nicely to her, he wrote often enough to her and in every letter he wrote to her that she should not do anything that was a disgraceful thing for her to be doing and then once she wrote back to him that he had not any right to write moral things in letters to her, that he had taught her that he had shown her that he had commenced in her the doing the things things that would disgrace her and he had said then when he had begun with her he had said he did it so that when she was older she could take care of herself with those who wished to make her do things that were wicked things and he would teach her and she would be stronger than such girls who had not any way of knowing better, and she wrote this letter and her father got the letter and he was a paralytic always after, it was a shock to him getting such a letter, he kept saying over and over again that his daughter was trying to kill him and now she had done it and at the time he got the letter he was sitting by the fire and he threw the letter in the fire and his wife asked him what was the matter and he said it is Edith she is killing me, what, is she disgracing us said the mother, no said the father, she is killing me and that was all he said then of the matter and he never wrote another letter. A rose is a rose is a rose. I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you. Nothing Elegant There's your answer. Romance is everything. There is no there there. A diary means yes indeed. One must dare to be happy Remarks are not literature. ...I have gone on beginning… Affectations can be dangerous. It is very easy to love alone. You are all a lost generation. There never has been an answer. If you can do it then why do it? There ain't gonna be any answer. Don't worry as long as you worry. The seam in between is fenceless. We are always the same age inside. In that case, what is the question? Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. Let me listen to me and not to them. You attract what you need like a lover Hemingway's remarks are not literature. Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer History takes time. History makes memory. Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary. You have to know what you want to get it. Paris was where the twentieth century was. Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone. America is my country and Paris is my hometown. This is the place of places and and it is here. War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost. Whenever you get there, there is no there there. The artist works by locating the world in himself what good are roots if you can't take them with you This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition. A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull. There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance. Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing. Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded. It will come if it is there and if you will let it come. I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it. If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation. I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich. So many words to use. Oh do not say that words have a use. Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure? I think the reason I am important is that I know everything. It was a strange winter and nothing and everything happened. There is no real reality to a really imagined life any more. What is music. A passion for colonies not a love of country. How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love. Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life Start over again. Concentrate." [to a young Ernest Hemingway] Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying. A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself. Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question. A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me. It is awfully important to know what is and what is not your business. I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich. Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable. Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War. I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do. twenty-five years run around so quickly but thirty one years is a long time. Counting is the religion of this generation it is its hope and its salvation. A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing. One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure. The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not. Start all over again and this time, concentrate." [to a young Ernest Hemingway] Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping. Do not forget birthdays. This is in no way a propaganda for a larger population. Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought. It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself. - Gertrude Stein It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important. The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting. between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write. On Ezra Pound: A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. It is extraordinary that when you are acquainted with a whole family you can forget about them. For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk up hill the ground is nearer. There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing. Kiss my lips. She did. Kiss my lips again she did. Kiss my lips over and over and over again she did. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself. I have lived half of my life in Paris, not the half the made me but the half in which I made what I made. If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening. The way to resume is to resume. If we knew everything ahead of time, all would be dictation not creation. Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing. Name any name and then remember everybody you ever knew who bore that name. Are they all alike. I think so. Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything. There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. It is an extraordinary thing but it is true, wars are only a means of publicising the things already accomplished. It is natural not to care about a sister certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night. I am I because my little dog knows me. That does not prove anything about [me] it only proves something about the dog. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is. Every adolescent has that dream every century has that dream every revolutionary has that dream, to destroy the family. Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something. What happened to-day, a narrative the composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented. That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation. When I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, How can I combine career and family? You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle. 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. 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. You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived. 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. Sarah Harrell "There is no use there is no use at all in smell, in taste, in teeth, in toast, in anything, there is no use at all and the respect is mutual. If everyone were not so indolent they would realise that beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic. I take back all the harsh things I said about your writing. It makes a picture and that is always good. But it is alright to learn to play Bach in writing too. Everybody thinks that this civilization has lasted a very long time but it really does take very few grandfathers’ granddaughters to take us back to the dark ages. 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. It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son. 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. Just as everybody has the vote including women, I think children should, because as a child is conscious of itself then it has to me an existence and has a stake in what happens. No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept. A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest. it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do. If the communication is perfect, the words have life, and that is all there is to good writing, putting down on the paper words which dance and weep and make love and fight and kiss and perform miracles. Callous is something that hardening leaves behind what will be soft if there is a genuine interest in there being present as many girls as men. Does this change. It shows that dirt is clean when there is a volume. Our little ford was almost ready. She was later to be called Auntie after Gertrude Stein's aunt Pauline who always behaved admirably in emergencies and behaved fairly well most times if she was properly flattered. Think of anything, of cowboys, of movies, of detective stories, of anybody who goes anywhere or stays at home and is an American and you will realize that it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving. It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realise the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger. Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are. The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing. The souls of people do not interest him, that is to say for him the reality of life is in the head, the face and the body and this is for him so important, so persistent, so complete that it is not at all necessary to think of any other thing and the soul is another thing. I have never understood how people could labor over a manuscript, write and rewrite it many times, for to me, if you have something to say, the words are always there. And they are the exact words that should be used. If the story does not come whole, tant pis, it has been spoiled. After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high. Anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. That is what makes a people, makes their kind of looks, their kind of thinking, their subtlety and their stupidity, and their eating and their drinking and their language. To be regularly gay was to do every day the gay thing that they did every day. To be regularly gay was to end every day at the same time after they had been regularly gay. They were regularly gay. They were gay every day. They ended every day in the same way, at the same time, and they had been every day regularly gay. Everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all that there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different. Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them. What is a sentence. A sentence is left to be alright and therefor (sic) they are barely here. A day is additional with there having been with a condition of remaining all day which it is partly that they like to look about made it for them in reference as they knew that is whenever they met by the arrangement which had been made for them in the mean time. What is a sentence. They need not be having them made by them. in 'Sentences' chapter, p. 175 my edition, How to Write. Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very very neat camouflage and it was american. The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities who did it the difference was inevitable. The colour schemes were different, the designs were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability. I caught sight of a splendid Misses. She had handerchiefs and kisses. She had eyes and yellow shoes she had everything to choose and she chose me. In passing through France she wore a Chinese hat and so did I. In looking at the sun she read a map and so did I…. In loving the blue sea she had a pain. And so did I. In loving me she of necessity thought first. And so did I. How prettily we swim. Not in water. Not on land. But in love. How often do we need trees and hills. Not often. And how often do we need mountains. Not very often. Most people are more predetermined as to what is the human form and the human face than they are as to what are flowers, landscapes, still lifes. Not everybody. I remember one of the first exhibitions of Van Gogh, there was an American there and she said to her friend, I find these portraits of people quite interesting for I don't know what people are like but I don't at all like these flower pictures because I know very well what flowers are like. Most people are not like that. I do not mean to say that they know people better than they know other things but they have stronger convictions about what people are than what other things are. In tender hearted natures, those that mostly never feel strong passion, suffering often comes to make them harder. When these do not know in themselves what it is to suffer, suffering is then very awful to them and they badly want to help everyone who has to suffer, and they have a deep reverence for anybody who knows really how to always suffer. But when it comes to them to really suffer, they soon begin to lose their fear and tenderness and wonder. Why it isn't so very much to suffer, when even I can bear to do it. It isn't very pleasant to be having all the time, to stand it, but they are not so much wiser after all, all the others just because they know too how to bear it. People really do not change from one generation to another, as far back as we know history people are about the same as they were, they have had the same needs, the same desires, the same virtues and the same qualities, the same defects, indeed nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing changes in people from one generation to another except the way of seeing and being seen, the streets change, the way of being driven in the streets change, the buildings change, the comforts in the houses change, but the people from one generation to another do not change. The creator in the arts is like all the rest of the people living, he is sensitive to the changes in the way of living and his is is inevitably influenced by the way each generation is living, the way each generation is being educated and the way they move about, all this creates the composition of that generation. It is a very strange feeling when one is loving a clock that is to every one of your class of living an ugly and a foolish one and one really likes such a thing and likes it very much and liking it is a serious thing, or one likes a colored handkerchief that is very gay and every one of your kind of living thinks it a very ugly or a foolish thing and thinks you like it because it is a funny thing to like it and you like it with a serious feeling, or you like eating something that is a dirty thing and no one can really like that thing or you write a book and while you write it you are ashamed for every one must think you a silly or a crazy one and yet you write it and you are ashamed, you know you will be laughed at or pitied by every one and you have a queer feeling and you are not very certain and you go on writing. Then someone says yes to it, to something you are liking, or doing or making and then never again can you have completely such a feeling of being afraid and ashamed that you had then when you were writing or liking the thing and not any one had said yes about the thing. —Quotes from Gertrude Stein, 1875-1946