Gertrude Stein Doe Quotations

A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

The nineteenth century believed in science but the twentieth century does not.

One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

Very likely education does not make very much difference.

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.

You never answer a question nobody does.

One thing is certain the only thing that makes you younger or older is that nothing can happen that is different from what you expected and when that happens and it mostly does happen everything is different from what you expected then there is no difference between being younger or older.

Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.

The unreal is natural, so natural that it makes of unreality the most natural of anything natural. That is what America does, and that is what America is.

I like familiarity. In me it does not bring contempt-only more familiarity.

it is all the question of identity. ... As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but when it does put a value on you then it gets inside or rather if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside.

I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody said that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.

If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.