Gertrude Stein

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

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.”

“Argument is to me the air I breathe. Given any proposition, I cannot help believing the other side and defending it.”

“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.”

“I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.”

“Remarks are not literature.”

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

“This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.”

“Poetry consists in a rhyming dictionary and things seen.”

“We are always the same age inside.”

“Sculpture is made with two instruments and some supports and pretty air.”

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

“But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don't get young men standing up and saying, 'How can I combine career and family?'”

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

“If you can do it then why do it?”