Repetition

22 September 2025 literature quotes repetition

I saw Gertrude Stein quoted in the TLS: “There is no such thing as repetition.” Searching this online turns up a lot of misquotes, so here’s where it comes from:

Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition.

Here it is with some context. This is from the second paragraph of “Portraits and Repetition” in Lectures in America (originally published by Random House in 1935; the Internet Archive has a few copies you can check out):

Then also there is the important question of repetition and is there any such thing. Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be. This is a thing about which I want you to think before I go on telling about portraits of anything. Think about all the detective stories everybody reads. The kind of crime is the same, and the idea of the story is very often the same, take for example a man like Wallace, he always has the same theme, take a man like Fletcher he always has the same theme, take any American ones, they too always have the scene, the same scene, the kind of invention that is necessary to make a general scheme is very limited in everybody’s experience, every time one of the hundreds of times a newspaper man makes fun of my writing and of my repetition he always has the same theme, always having the same theme, that is, if you like, repetition, that is if you like the repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis. And so let us think seriously of the difference between repetition and insistence.

(That’s Edgar Wallace and J.S. Fletcher.)

A few pages later she repeats the phrase:

When I first began writing portraits of any one I was not so sure, not so certain of this thing that there is no difference between clarity and confusion. I was however almost certain then when I began writing portraits that if anything is alive there is no such thing as repetition. I do not know that I have ever changed my mind about that.

I’ll also quote from “Repetition” by the Fall, from their 1978 debut Bingo-Master’s Break-Out! (fan site source, lyrics are by Mark E. Smith):