Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
“Reflection on the Atomic Bomb” (1946), Yale Poetry Review (Dec 1947)
(Source)
Quotations by:
Stein, Gertrude
I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. It’s better to be rich.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
(Attributed)
All of you young people who served in the war, you are a lost generation. … You have no respect for anything. You drink yourselves to death.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
(Attributed)
Quoted by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, ch. 3 (1964). Also served as the epigraph for The Sun Also Rises (1926).
For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Composition as Explanation (1926)
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Everybody’s Autobiography, ch. 1 (1937)
(Source)
I do want to get rich but I never what to do what there is to do to get rich.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Everybody’s Autobiography, ch. 3 (1937)
It always did bother me that the American public were more interested in me than in my work. And after all there is no sense in it because if it were not for my work they would not be interested in me so why should they not be more interested in my work than in me. That is one of the things one has to worry about in America.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Everybody’s Autobiography, ch. 2 (1937)
The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Mrs. Reynolds and Five Earlier Novelettes, Part 1 (written 1940-1943) (1952)
One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Paris France (1940)
Disillusionment in living is finding that no one can really ever be agreeing with you completely in anything.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
The Making of Americans (1925; written 1903-11)
Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
The Radcliffe Manuscripts, “Form and Intelligibility” (1949; written 1895)
It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize 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.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Wars I Have Seen(1945)
“What is the answer?” [ I was silent ] “In that case, what is the question?”
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Last words (27 Jul 1946)
In Alice B. Toklas, What Is Remembered (1963).
One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) American expatriate author, feminist
Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (22 May 1925)
Published in Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945).