Gertrude Stein

A village explainer. Excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."(on Ezra Pound)

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.

She told her father Mr. Abram Colhard that she did not like it at all being one being living then. He never said anything. She was afraid then, she was one needing charming stories and happy telling of them and not having that thing she was always trembling.

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.

Spaniards and Americans are not like Europeans, they are not like Orientals, they have something in common, that is they do not need religion or mysticism not to believe in reality as all the world knows it, not even when they see it.

It is very easy to love alone.

It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,

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

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

There is too much fathering going on just now and there is no doubt about it fathers are depressing.

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

Men and girls, men and girls: Artificial swine and pearls.

Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.

Romance is everything.

Money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.