Gertrude Stein

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.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

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

The minute you or anybody else knows what you are you are not it, you are what you or anybody else knows you are and as everything in living is made up of finding out what you are it is extraordinarily difficult really not to know what you are and yet to be that thing.

What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

A masterpiece... may be unwelcome but it is never dull.

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Men cannot count, they do not know that two and two make four if women do not tell them so.

It is always a mistake to be plain-spoken.

We are always the same age inside.

Eating and sleeping are not like loving and breathing. Washing is not like eating and sleeping. Believing is like breathing and loving. Religion can be believing, it can be like breathing, it can be like loving, it can be like eating or sleeping, it can be like washing, it can be something to fill up a place when someone has lost out of them a piece that it was not natural for them to have in them.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Just before she died she asked, What is the answer? No answer came. She laughed and said, In that case, what is the question? Then she died.

A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.

Suppose no one asked a question. _x000D_ What would the answer be?

Every day is a renewal, every morning the daily miracle. This joy you feel is life.

One of the things that I discovered in lecturing was that gradually one ceased to hear what one said one heard what the audience hears one say.

Even the propagandists on the radio find it very difficult to really say let alone believe that the world will be a happy place, of love and peace and plenty, and that the lion will lie down with the lamb and everybody will believe anybody.

Since the war nothing is so really frightening not the dark not alone in a room or anything on a road or a dog or a moon but two things, yes, indigestion and high places they are frightening.