Gertrude Ederle Quotes

“To me, the sea is like a person - like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea, I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there.”

“You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might.”

“Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.”

“I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.”

“I love my love with a b because she is peculiar.”

“Out of the darkness, out of the night,May I find joy and all that is right:Open my eyes, so I'll see the lightThat comes when we have spiritual sight.~Gertrude Tooley Buckingham, "Infinite Spirit, Abide With Me" (1940's)”

“It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before,”

“It is very easy to love alone.”

“I could never stop comparing the way it was with Gertrud and the way it had been with Hanna; again and again, Gertrud and I would hold each other, and I would feel that something was wrong, that she was wrong, that she moved wrong and felt wrong, smelled wrong and tasted wrong. I thought I would get over it. I hoped it would go away. I wanted to be free of Hanna. But I never got over the feeling that something was wrong.”

“I had often said that I would write, the wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. In short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.' Gertrude Stein wrote this in the voice of her partner, Alice B. Toklas, Stein being apparently the genius, Alice apparently the wife. 'I am nothing,' Alice said after Gertrude dies, 'but a memory of her.'...the flashing blues and red made him look ill, then well, then ill again...”