Stella Benson Quotes & Sayings

Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. — Stella Benson

Sometimes I pose, but sometimes I pose as posing. — Stella Benson

Call no man a foe, but never love a stranger. — Stella Benson

This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered a trespasser. — Stella Benson

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never have time to be busy. — Stella Benson

Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten. — Stella Benson

Come home, come home, you million ghosts,
The honest years shall make amends,
The sun and moon shall be your hosts,
The everlasting hills your friends. — Stella Benson

You want the vote so badly that you think it worth while to become hysterical over it.' 'There is not much hysteria in the movement, only hysteria is the thing that strikes a hysterical press as most worthy of note. — Stella Benson

The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead. — Stella Benson

Music is the ethereal connection between this world and the other. — Stella Benson

It is a place of fine weather, and this is a book of fine weather, a book written in Spring. I will not remember the winter and the rain. It was the Spring that brought Sarah Brown to Mitten Island, and the Spring that first showed her magic. It was the Spring that awoke her on her first morning in the House of Living Alone. — Stella Benson

Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canaary as a substitute for a husband. — Stella Benson

My love, I see you through my tears.
No pity in your face I see.
I have sailed far across the years;
Stretch out, stretch out your arms to me. — Stella Benson

We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back. — Stella Benson

My soundless feet shall fly among the runners
Through the red thunders of a Zeppelin raid,
My still voice cheer the Anti-Aircraft gunners,
The fires shall glare - but I shall cast no shade. — Stella Benson

The music paled like a candle and went out ... — Stella Benson

I want to go out into the country, I want to thread the pale Spring air, and hear the lambs cry. I want to brush my face against the grass, and wade in a wave of bluebells. — Stella Benson

London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance. There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again. — Stella Benson

The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the imaginative fling it joyfully behind them. — Stella Benson

Trees, skies, valleys mountains, seen through the rain-spotted windshield, were like a distorted, stippled landscape painted by a beginner who has not yet learned to wring living colour from his palette. — Stella Benson

I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share it ... I am sure that the great glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement. — Stella Benson

There are some people who can never see a little cloud of fantasy float across the horizon of their dreams without building a heavy castle in the air upon it, and bringing it to earth. — Stella Benson

Los Angeles is a sophisticated city; it has no eccentricities and no heart. — Stella Benson

Nearly everybody in San Francisco writes poetry. Few San Franciscans would admit this, but most of them would rather like to have their productions accidentally discovered. — Stella Benson

That sea - that mother of a million summers,
Who bore, with melody, a million springs,
Shall sing for my enchantment... — Stella Benson

The moment of cocoa-drinking was always the moment of confidences. — Stella Benson

Americans were people who wanted to leave every place better than they found it, to leave every man more of a man than they found him ... Americans could open doors to almost all that was admirable - it was their misfortune, not their fault, that movies and victrolas and advertisements squeezed in when they opened the door. — Stella Benson

The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it. — Stella Benson

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people - the autobiographists and the biographists. — Stella Benson

What is this Charity, this clinking of money between strangers, and when did Charity cease to be a comforting and secret thing between one friend and another? Does Love make her voice heard through a committee, does Love employ an almoner to convey her message to her neighbor? ... The real Love knows her neighbor face to face, and laughs with him and weeps with him, and eats and drinks with him, so that at last, when his black day dawns, she may share with him, not what she can spare, but all that she has. — Stella Benson

The hoarse church-bells of London ring;
The hoarser horns of London croak;
The poor brown lives of London cling
About the poor brown streets like smoke;
The deep air stands above my roof
Like water, to the floating stars.
My friend and I - we sit aloof -
We sit and smile, and bind our scars. — Stella Benson

Always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew. — Stella Benson

The sun was like a word written between the sea and the sky, a word that was swallowed up by the sea before any man had time to read it. — Stella Benson

Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys. — Stella Benson

London knows much, and every momeny she learns a new thing, but this she shall never learn - that the sun shines all day and the moon all night on the silver tiles of her dark house, and that the young months climb her walls, and run singing in and out between her chimneys... — Stella Benson

Call no man foe, but never love a stranger. — Stella Benson

To-day she had watched magic dancing in a mackintosh, and she was at a loss. — Stella Benson

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows. — Stella Benson

And you shall find upon the beach
The traces of my dancing — Stella Benson

They were not spontaneous people. They were born with too great a love of words, a passion for drama at the expense of truth, and a habit of overweighting common life with romance. — Stella Benson

Her grammar in moments of emergency always impressed Kew. — Stella Benson

Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach. — Stella Benson

Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told that she must occupy a Place Apart - and indeed, so far Apart did her place prove to be that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. You practically never see a happy cow in India. — Stella Benson

Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive. — Stella Benson

Unpopularity is a excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to be misunderstood. — Stella Benson

Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed - or cursed - with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple. — Stella Benson

I want to introduce you to Jay, a 'bus-conductor and an idealist. She is not the heroine, but the most constantly apparent woman in this book. I cannot introduce you to a heroine because I have never met one. — Stella Benson

There pass the trav'lling dreams, and these
My soul adores — Stella Benson

A committee, of course, exists for the purpose of damping enthusiasms. — Stella Benson

You can't discover one foot of clay on an idol without suspecting the other. — Stella Benson

To-night the swinging stars shall plumb
The silence of the sky. — Stella Benson