Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Steinwas an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector. Born in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures in modernism in literature and art would meet, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth3 February 1874
CityPittsburgh, PA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
The whole duty of man consists in being reasonable and just I am reasonable because I know the difference between understanding and not understanding and I am just because I have no opinion about things I don’t understand.
Repeating is the whole of living and by repeating comes understanding, and understanding is to some the most important part of living.
Always it comes very slowly the completed understanding of it, the repeating each one does to tell it the whole history of the being in each one, always now I hear it. Always now slowly I understand it.
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear readers, are an after-thought.
What was the use of my having come from Oakland, it was not natural to have come from there, yes, write about it if I like or anything, if I like, but not there, there is no there there
Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
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.
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
Well, she certainly hadn't a fair run for her money.
I've been rich and I've been poor. It's better to be rich.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
In the United States there is more space where nobody is is than where anybody is.
I cannot write too much upon how necessary it is to be completely conservative that is particularly traditional in order to be free.