One must dare to be happy.
We are always the same age inside.
It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much, doing nothing, really doing nothing.
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
You look ridiculous if you dance You look ridiculous if you don't dance So you might as well dance.
If you can't say anything nice about anyone else, come sit next to me.
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's your answer.
Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.
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.
Let me listen to me and not to them.
In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.
A very important thing is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing.
I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to get rich.
Why should a sequence of words be anything but a pleasure?
You attract what you need like a lover
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.
If you are too careful, you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
You have to know what you want to get it.
There is no such thing as repetition. Only insistance.
America is my country, and Paris is my home town.
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.
You are all a lost generation.
You are extraordinary within your limits, but your limits are extraordinary!
Nothing is really so very frightening when everything is so very dangerous
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
I certainly do care for you Jeff Campbell less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever knowing
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?
Whenever you get there, there is no there there.
There is no there there.
She always says she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious. She says the normal is so much more simply complicated and interesting.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
If you can do it then why do it?
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
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.
If you knew it all it would not be creation but dictation.
A FEATHER. 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.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.
What is the answer?" [ I [Alice B Toklas] was silent ] In that case, what is the question?
It is very easy to love alone.
This is the place of places and and it is here.
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.
The artist works by locating the world in himself
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.
War is never fatal but always lost. Always lost.
I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.
Affectations can be dangerous.
I am I because my little dog knows me.
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.
Hope in gates, hope in spoons, hope in doors, hope in tables, no hope in daintiness and determination. Hope in dates.
Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.
There is no reason why a king should be rich or a rich man should be a king, no reason at all.
I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.
Once upon a time Baltimore was necessary.
Love is the skillful audacity required to share an inner life
Romance is everything.
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
Asparagus in a lean in a lean is to hot. This makes it art and it is wet weather wet weather wet
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.
Wake a question. Eat an instant, answer
How prettily we swim. Not in water, not on land, but in love.
A light white, a disgras, an ink spot, a rosy charm.
Remarks are not literature.
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,
What good are roots if you can't take them with you
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.
...they do quote me, that means that my words and my sentences get under their skins although they do no know it.
I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
So many words to use. Oh do not say that words have a use.
There never will be anything more interesting than that American Civil War.
The seam in between is fenceless.
A cool red rose and a pink cut pink, a collapse and a sold hole, a little less hot. - Red roses.
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.
When is there some discharge when. There never is.
Let me repeat what history teaches. History teaches.
Twenty-five years run around so quickly but thirty one years is a long time.
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.
There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.
Cloudiness what is cloudiness, is it a lining, is it a roll, is it melting.
If you can do it, why do it." ~ Gertrude Stein
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.
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 village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." (on Ezra Pound)
I wish to remain to remember that stanzas go on
A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time.
I write for myself and strangers.
Some one who was living was almost always listening. Some one who was loving was almost always listening.
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There ain't no answer. There ain't going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer. (Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures)
Sugar is not a vegetable.
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.
The composition of each epoch depends upon the way the frequented roads are frequented.
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.
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.
