Gertrude Stein
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"Gertrude Stein" was an American writer of novels, poetry and plays. Born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh/Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. A literary innovator and pioneer of Modernist literature, Stein’s work broke with the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th-century. She was also known as a collector of Modernist art.

In 1933, Stein published a kind of memoir of her Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of Toklas, her life partner. The book became a literary bestseller and vaulted Stein from the relative obscurity of cult literary figure into the light of mainstream attention.

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The first hope of a painter who feels hopeful about painting is the hope that the painting will move, that it will live outside its frame.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

You'll be old and you never lived, and you kind of feel silly to lie down and die and to never have lived, to have been a job chaser and never have lived.

Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone.

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

The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there.

We know that we can do what men can do, but we still don't know that men can do what women can do. That's absolutely crucial. We can't go on doing two jobs.

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.

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

I do want to get rich, but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.

Money is always there, but the pockets change.

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

We are always the same age inside.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.