Things Gertrude Stein Said

"A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."

Gertrude Stein (1874 - 1946)

                                                                                                                  Portrait by Picasso

The sense of movement in Stein's language is characterized by a phrase she uses in giving directions to the reader of the second chapter in The Making of Americans: "wait while I hasten slowly forwards..."

Stein on the noun

"A noun is a name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not ... things once they are named does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns. Nouns are the name of anything and just naming names is alright when you want to call a roll but is it good for anything else."

On composition

"The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living."

On similarity and difference

"It was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is different, it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again if it is all so alike it must be simply different and everything simply difference was the natural way of creating it then."

On narrative

"I think one naturally is impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one...is emerging from adolescence.... American writing has been an escaping not an escaping but an existing with the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of anything have a beginning and a middle and an ending."

On imagination

“It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”