A creator is not in advance of his generation, but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.

— Gertrude Stein

A FEATHER. A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

— Gertrude Stein

After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is separate from themselves, it is not real, but it is really there.

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

A rose is a rose is a rose.

— Gertrude Stein

At any moment when you are you, you are you without the memory of yourself because if you remember yourself while you are you, you are not for the purposes of creating you.

— Gertrude Stein

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.

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

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

— Gertrude Stein

Before the flowers of friendship faded.

— Gertrude Stein