Life & Wisdom Quote by Gertrude Stein

Stein barges into the room with a grin you can hear. “Once more I can climb about” is deliberately unseemly: a famous writer refusing the still, tasteful posture expected of “serious” thinkers, especially women. She makes her authority physical, almost mischievous, as if intellect is something you scramble up to claim rather than inherit. The phrase “remind you” is the knife. Stein isn’t asking to be included; she’s scolding an audience that keeps forgetting who’s doing the work.

The real provocation sits in “a woman in this epoch.” Not “women,” not “feminism,” not a tidy program. Singular. It’s both a swaggering self-portrait and a strategic narrowing of the claim: she names herself as the emblem while exposing how the era’s literary gatekeepers treat women’s thought as an exception that must be re-announced. “Important literary thinking” is also a stealth critique of what counts as “literary” and who gets credit for thinking it. Stein wrote in a period when modernism loved to posture as revolutionary while still leaning on old hierarchies; her sentence punctures that contradiction.

Context matters: Stein’s Paris salon helped incubate the modernist canon while her own work was dismissed as unserious, repetitive, “nonsense” - code for “unruly.” The line performs her aesthetic too: looping, insistent, slightly off-kilter, engineered to make complacency uncomfortable. It’s not just a claim of brilliance; it’s a reminder that even avant-garde culture needs constant shoving to recognize women as producers of ideas, not just patrons, muses, or footnotes.