Гертруда Стайн цитаты

страница 3

„Я был богат и беден. Лучше быть богатым.“

„Чтение и письмо для меня равносильны существованию.“

„Правильно брошенный мужчина возвращается как бумеранг.“

„Нет никакого ответа.
Никакого ответа не будет.
Никакого ответа никогда не было.
Есть твой ответ.“

„Утром есть смысл, вечером есть чувство.“

„Забавно, что большинство мужчин гордятся двумя вещами, которые любой мужчина может делать в точности так же: напиваться и зачинать сыновей.“

„Деньги всегда есть, только карманы меняются.“

„Вся молодежь, побывавшая на войне. Вы — потерянное поколение.“

„Очень легко любить, когда ты один.“

„Дамы, для нас нет нейтральной позиции.“

„Продолжайте делать то, что делаете. Прикидывайтесь, что вы это делаете, и так до тех пор, пока дело не будет сделано.“

„Любой, кто трижды женился на женщинах из Сент-Луиса, немногому научился в жизни.“

„Когда бы ты не попал туда, никакого "там" там не будет.“

„Требуется куча бездельничать, чтобы написать книгу.“

„Мне нравится вид, но я люблю сидеть, повернувшись к нему спиной.“

„Вычеркнуть у автора даже самое короткое слово - все равно что вычеркнуть все.“

„Внутри себя все мы одного возраста.“

„Все, что ты делаешь каждый день, важно и внушительно, и везде, где ты живешь, интересно и красиво.“

„Трудно любить чужие идеи о том, чтобы быть смешным.“

„Если вы можете сделать это, то почему это делать?“

“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.”

“Is it worse to be scared than to be bored, that is the question.”

“Now they can do the radio in so many languages that nobody any longer dreams of a single language, and there should not any longer be dreams of conquest because the globe is all one, anybody can hear everything and everybody can hear the same thing, so what is the use of conquering.”

“Grammar little by little is not a thing. Which may gain.
There. Make twenty-five be a woman. The meaning of that does not interest me. It is a complexion that interests that makes ridiculous because that does not make it something else. But it does make them which is again me.
Make twenty-five be a woman. I do not lose it. The color is there. Do you see. Dependent entirely upon how one word follows another. Who knows how Howard likes hearing. I can do it so easily it always makes grammar but is it grammar. Forget grammar and think about potatoes. Grammar after all has to do with why they were presented.”

“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.”

“It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.”

“If anything is a surprise then there is not much difference between older and younger because the only thing that does make anybody older is that they cannot be surprised.”

“I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”

“Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know.”

“It is funny that men who are supposed to be scientific cannot get themselves to realize the basic principle of physics, that action and reaction are equal and opposite, that when you persecute people you always rouse them to be strong and stronger.”

“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”

“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.”

“The family is always the family but during vacations it is an extended family and that is exhausting”

“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.”

“A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.”

“It bothers a lot of people, but like you said, it's nobody's business, it came from the Judeo-Christian ethos, especially Saint Paul the bastard, but he was complaining about youngsters who were not really that way, they did it for money, everybody suspects us or knows but nobody says anything about it.”

“A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr does something but a really good saint does nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints In Three Acts and they did nothing and that was everything.
Generally speaking anybody is more interesting doing nothing than doing something.”

“Ladies there is no neutral position for us to assume.”

“If the stars are suns and the earth is the earth and there are men only upon this earth and anything can put an end to anything and any dog does anything like anybody does it what is the difference between eternity and anything.”

“Americans are very friendly and very suspicious, that is what Americans are and that is what always upsets the foreigner, who deals with them, they are so friendly how can they be so suspicious and they are so suspicious how can they be so friendly but they just are.”

“After all human beings have to live dogs too so as not to know that time is passing, that is the whole business of living to go on so they will not know that time is passing, that is why they get drunk that is why they like to go to war, during a war there is the most complete absence of the sense that time is passing a year of war lasts so much longer than any other year. After all that is what life is and that is the reason there is no Utopia, little or big young or old dog or man everybody wants every minute so filled that they are not conscious of that minute passing. It's just as well they do not think about it you have to be a genius to live in it and know it to exist in it and express it to accept it and deny it by creating it.”

“Nothing could bother me more than the way a thing goes dead once it has been said.”

“Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.”

“The head-lines which do not head anything they simply replace something but they do not make anything.”

“When you are writing before there is an audience anything written is as important as any other thing and you cherish anything and everything that you have written. After the audience begins, naturally they create something that is they create you, and so not everything is so important, something is more important than another thing.”

“Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”

“Alice Toklas' father had almost once had an oil well they dug and dug but naturally the oil did not gush, naturally not these things never do happen to any one one knows, if it could happen to them you would not be very likely to know them most naturally not.”

“A saint is one to be for two when three and you make five and two and cover.
A at most.
Saint saint a saint.”

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