. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
Gertrude SteinRead
I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.
Interpretation
Gertrude Stein expresses a joy in the freedom and necessity of words in creative expression.
This quote by Gertrude Stein captures the essence of artistic expression through language. It highlights the dual nature of words, where they can be both free to flow creatively and bound by the rules of language and meaning. Stein suggests that there is beauty in allowing words to take on their own paths while still acknowledging their intrinsic purpose within communication and art.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might quote this to emphasize the beauty of language.
. . . money . . . is really the difference between men and animals, most of the things men feel, animals feel, and vice versa, but animals do not know about money.
The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.
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.
The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.
I simply contend that the middle-class ideal which demands that people be affectionate, respectable, honest and content, that they avoid excitements and cultivate serenity is the ideal that appeals to me, it is in short the ideal of affectionate family life, of honorable business methods.
It is natural to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes to that siren until she allures us to our death.
Itβs not a lie. Itβs a gift for fiction.
Perhaps when I have 10 films behind me, I will have something worth saying.
I write as a witness to what I have seen.
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Writing is reporting what we saw after the vision has left us. It is catching the fish which the tide has left far up on our shores in the low and depressed places.
Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.
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