Gertrude Stein, Writer and Thinker

Front Cover
LIT Verlag Münster, 2000 - 393 pages

From inside the book

Contents

III
33
IV
37
V
48
VI
57
VIII
75
IX
96
X
107
XI
114
XX
191
XXI
194
XXII
214
XXIII
227
XXV
233
XXVI
247
XXVII
259
XXVIII
265

XII
119
XIII
130
XIV
134
XV
150
XVII
158
XVIII
179
XIX
182
XXXI
282
XXXII
292
XXXIII
307
XXXIV
319
XXXV
337
XXXVI
389
Copyright

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 183 - Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?
Page 71 - The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
Page 108 - ... a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world...
Page 60 - To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.
Page 53 - ... the knower is not simply a mirror floating with no foot-hold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action — action which to a great extent transforms the world — help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs...
Page 302 - Here, again, language works against our perception of the truth. We name our thoughts simply, each after its thing, as if each knew its own thing and nothing else. What each really knows is clearly the thing it is named for, with dimly perhaps a thousand other things. It ought to be named after all of them, but it never is.
Page 255 - ... case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and comparing mind. But the stars (once the mind considers them) themselves dictate the result. The counting in no wise modifies their previous nature, and, they being what and where they are, the count cannot fall out differently. It could then always be made. Never could the number seven be questioned, if the question once were raised. We have here a quasi-paradox. Undeniably something comes by the counting that was not there before. And...
Page 65 - The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.
Page 178 - That how an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is; so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its 'being' is constituted by its 'becoming.
Page 51 - The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

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