23 Gertrude Stein Quotes on Identity

Gertrude Stein quotes on identity

2. One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

4. When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.

23. Human nature, human nature acts as it acts when it is identified when there is an identity but it is not human nature that has anything to do with that it is that anybody is there where they are, it is that that has to do with identity, with government and propaganda with history with individualism and with communism but it has nothing nothing to do with the human mind...because the human mind writes what there is and what has identity go to do with that...nothing at all.

24. They were regular in being gay, they learned little things that are things in being gay, they learned many little things that are things in being gay, they were gay every day, they were regular, they were gay, they were gay the same length of time every day, they were gay, they were quite regularly gay.

25. Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

26. I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like some one else too to me. No one of them that I know can want to know it and so I write for myself and strangers.

29. Repeating then is in every one, in every one their being and their feeling and their way of realizing everything and every one comes out of them in repeating. More and more then every one comes to be clear to some one.

51. In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.

52. Growing has no connection with audience. Audience has no connection with identity. Identity has no connection with a universe. A universe has no connection with human nature.

53. It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

55. America is my country and Paris is my home town and it is as it has come to be.

56. And so I am an American and I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made.

61. Suddenly it was all different, what I did had a value that made people ready to pay, up to that time everything I did had a value because nobody was ready to pay. It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your little dog knows you, but when your public knows you and does not want to pay for you and when your public knows you and does want to pay for you, you are not the same you. ~Ch. 2

66. And identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself. ~ Ch. 2

69. 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. ~ Ch. 3

79. I dislike it when instead of saying Jew they say Hebrew or Israelite, or Semite, I do not like it and why should a Negro want to be called colored. Why should we want to lose being a Negro... I have stated that a noun to me is a stupid thing, if you know a thing and its name why bother about it but you have to know its name to talk about it. Well its name is Negro if it is a Negro and Jew if it is a Jew and both of them are nice strong names and so let us keep them. ~ Ch. 4

85. I was clear, Alice Toklas says and very often mistaken but anyway I am clear I am a good American, I am slow-minded and quickly clear in expression, I am certain that I see everything that is seen and in between I stand around but I do not wait, no American can wait he can stand around and do nothing but he cannot wait, that is why he is not like Milton who served by standing and waiting, Americans can neither serve nor wait, they can stand and sit down and get up and walk around but they can neither serve nor wait. ~ Ch. 5

87. Perhaps I am not I even if my little dog knows me but anyway I like what I have and now it is today. ~ Ch. 5

90. 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, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there. (New York: Liveright, 1970, p. 2)

123. I'll always be Alice Toklas if you'll be Gertrude Stein.

125. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose said my old friend Gertrude Stein.

129. Let me listen to me and not to them.

131. We are always the same age inside.