5 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Gertrude Stein wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around.
How these quotes were checked
Gertrude Stein's most quoted sentences are also her most misquoted: the rose line loses a word, the Oakland line loses its meaning. Every quotation here is checked against the complete texts of the books she published, or located in her own later volumes.
Two famous cases are documented below, including the sentence she is best known for and never actually wrote.
A sentence linked to Hemingway may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
Stein's line, in the 1913 poem “Sacred Emily,” is “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” — no opening article, and four roses rather than three. Rose in the poem is a woman's name, which is the joke the popular version deletes.
Stein said it in conversation; the record of it is Ernest Hemingway's, who printed it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises in 1926 and told the story again in A Moveable Feast. No text of Stein's own carries the sentence, so it survives only in his reporting of her.
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
There is no there there.
A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.
Anna led an arduous and troubled life.
Helen Furr had quite a pleasant home. Mrs. Furr was quite a pleasant woman. Mr. Furr was quite a pleasant man. Helen Furr had quite a pleasant voice a voice quite worth cultivating.
Not quite. Her line, from the 1913 poem “Sacred Emily,” is “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” There is no opening article, there are four roses, and Rose is a woman's name.
She was writing in Everybody's Autobiography (1937) about going back to Oakland, California, and finding that the house she grew up in had been demolished. The line is now used as a verdict on empty places; she meant a particular missing house.
She said it to him in conversation, and Hemingway put it in print — as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises in 1926, and again in A Moveable Feast. The phrase reaches us through his account rather than through anything she wrote.
A 1914 book of prose poems in three sections — Objects, Food, Rooms — that describes ordinary things until ordinary description stops working. It is the clearest statement of the style that made Stein famous and difficult in equal measure.
Three Lives, in 1909, three linked stories of working women. It opens with “Anna led an arduous and troubled life.”
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gertrude Stein page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Gertrude Stein page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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