Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes & Sayings

I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat. — Stephen Vincent Benet

There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned — Stephen Vincent Benet

And Thames and all the rivers of the kings Ran into Mississippi and were drowned. They planted England with a stubborn trust But the cleft dust was never English dust. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I tried to think of my knowledge, but it was a squirrel's heap of winter nuts. There was no strength in my knowledge any more and I felt small and naked as a new-hatched bird. — Stephen Vincent Benet

We can no longer take our own way of life for granted - we know that it may be challenged. And we know this, too - and know it ever more deeply - we know that freedom and democracy are not just big words mouthed by orators but the rain and the wind and the sun, the air and the light by which we breathe and live. — Stephen Vincent Benet

A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning antracite - that was Dan'l Webster in his prime. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Oh, Georgia booze is mighty fine booze, The best yuh ever poured yuh, But it eats the soles right offen yore shoes, For Hell's broke loose in Georgia. — Stephen Vincent Benet

You call my candidate a horse thief, and I call yours a lunatic, and we both of us know it's just till election day. It's an American custom, like eating corn on the cob. And, afterwards, we settle down quite peaceably and agree we've got a pretty good country - until next election. — Stephen Vincent Benet

The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Let us be bold enough and free enough to follow the great examples - the men of good will and honor who put aside little ways and petty hatreds to build the American dream. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men. — Stephen Vincent Benet

We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town. — Stephen Vincent Benet

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Remember that when you say 'I will have none of this exile and this stranger for his face is not like my face and his speech is strange,' you have denied America with that word. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years - a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Books are not men and yet they are alive. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs. — Stephen Vincent Benet

You work hard, and you'll rise. But, if you've got any foolish notions, just knock them on the head and forget them. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I had lost something in my youth and made money instead. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee — Stephen Vincent Benet

When the last moonshiner buys his radio,
And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl
Is civilized with a mail-order dress,
Something will pass that was American
And all the movies will not bring it back. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Defeat is a fact and victory can be a fact. If the idea is good, it will survive defeat, it may even survive the victory. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity. — Stephen Vincent Benet

When Daniel Boone goes by at night
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes. — Stephen Vincent Benet

There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Most of the time I'm not really attracted to writing that's focused on filling and fighting it out within a well-defined container. I like work that gets out in the world and lets the world shape the poem. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Go play with the towns you have built of blocks, The towns where you would have bound me! I sleep in my earth like a tired fox, And my bufdfalo have found me. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Broad-streeted Richmond ... The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name. — Stephen Vincent Benet

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart. — Stephen Vincent Benet

It is better the truth should come little by little. I have learned that, being a priest. Perhaps, in the old days, they ate knowledge too fast. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Something begins, begins;Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroadIn flesh and spirit and fire.Something is loosed to change the shaken world. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I don't think I have ever really gotten Leopold Bloom's interior ramblings out of my head! I am sure that voice continues to inspire the walking consciousness in my work - that is, the way I carry on an interior monologue as I walk through this city. — Stephen Vincent Benet

We cannot be a house divided - divided in will, divided in interest, divided in soul. We cannot be a house divided and live. — Stephen Vincent Benet

It's time to walk to the cider mill
Through air like apple wine,
And watch the moon rise over the hill,
stinging and hard and fine.
It's time to bury your seed pods deep
And let them wait and be warm.
It's time to sleep the heavy sleep
That does not wake for the storm. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory. — Stephen Vincent Benet

We do not fight for the real but for shadows we make. A flag is a piece of cloth and a word is a sound, But we make them something neither cloth nor a sound, Totems of love and hate, black sorcery-stones. — Stephen Vincent Benet

It's to a younger people's advantage to work with evolving computer technologies that provide so many ways to explore the use and distribution of text, including sound, images and motion. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls,Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars -They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble,Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesyThat something new is coming to the world,The Lord knows what!Well, it's a long time coming,And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Technology will never rescue anyone from being a bad poet, but if you're good, it has the potential to do a lot of exciting things. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it. — Stephen Vincent Benet

It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside. — Stephen Vincent Benet

As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.' — Stephen Vincent Benet

Few people have written significant books about San Francisco. Robert Duncan was, in my opinion, often in the clouds. If he walked the streets a lot he didn't write about as such. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Life was a storm to wander through. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Trouble with women. Can't do any art and be married if you're in love with your wife. — Stephen Vincent Benet

American Muse, whose strong and diverse heart So many men have tried to understand But only made it smaller with their art, Because you are as various as your land. — Stephen Vincent Benet

You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you'd better. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Occasionally I encounter people getting into their cars who will say, "Oh, you haven't been walking lately" - like I'm a symbol of the ancient art of walking! — Stephen Vincent Benet

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books! — Stephen Vincent Benet

When my own writing needs a perk, I open Zukofsky and read from "A" - particularly sections "22" and "23." It can be opaque, but I love the intensity. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me. — Stephen Vincent Benet

God pity us indeed, for we are human,And do not always seeThe vision when it comes, the shining change,Or, if we see it, do not follow it,Because it is too hard, too strange, too new,Too unbelievable, too difficult,Warring too much with common, easy ways,And now I know this, standing in this light,Who have been half alive these many years,Brooding on my own sorrow, my own pain,Saying I am a barren bough. ExpectNor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Since graveyards are often built over older burial grounds, I assume Dolores Park was probably an Indian, (an Ohlone) graveyard before that. I think the fact that it has so many layers underneath the contemporary one intrigues me. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Of all the Christbitten places in the two hemispheres, (Los Angeles) is the last curly kink in the pig's tail. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Basically when I'm walking I'm not consciously writing or intending anything. In the manner I have learned from meditation practice, I let things unfold. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Grant us a common faith that we shall know bread and peace-that we shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do our best not only in our own lands, but throughout the world. And in that faith let us march toward the clean world our hands can make. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Treat a boy like a fool and he'll act like a fool, I say, but there's some folks need convincing. — Stephen Vincent Benet

The other week I wrote a piece on a photograph I got at a flea market, and I got about 70 hits. I think a lot of people must be interested in flea markets. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Ironically the blog has re-opened the essay as a good form for me. I like to look and make commentary! If I sense my essays are good, I try to resubmit to another place in pulp and several of them have been variously published in newspapers and magazines. — Stephen Vincent Benet

The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground. — Stephen Vincent Benet

If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. — Stephen Vincent Benet

The blog is also a way to continue to register what I see and hear in a day - no matter what the form. In fact, my blog is a complete mixture of forms. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Dreaming men are haunted men. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Money is sullen And wisdom is sly, But youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why. — Stephen Vincent Benet

At first I was blogging everyday, but I don't do that anymore. It varies; sometimes I'll write these little essays and other times political commentaries. Other times it'll just be new work that I'm doing. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth. — Stephen Vincent Benet

There are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I am tired of loving a foreign muse. — Stephen Vincent Benet

You can't depend on the kind of folks people think they are - you've got to go by what they do. And I wouldn't give much for a man that some folks hadn't thought was a fool, in his time. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I've been reading a lot lately about Indian captives. One woman who had been captured by the Indians and made a squaw was resentful when she was rescued because she'd found that there was a lot more work to do as the wife of a white man. — Stephen Vincent Benet

Seine and Piave are silver spoons,
But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn — Stephen Vincent Benet

You can't do business with a man who doesn't know the meaning of a contract. You can't do business with a firm who swears they'll do one thing one day and does just the opposite the next. You can't do business with a company who takes your goods on a cash basis and then pays you off in bum harmonicas. — Stephen Vincent Benet

When I was in graduate school, my thesis included both poetry and essays. Influenced by the personal essays of James Baldwin and Norman Mailer, I loved the form, but pretty much stopped. — Stephen Vincent Benet

It is forbidden to go east, but I have gone, forbidden to go on the great river, but I am there. Open your hearts, you spirits, and hear my song. — Stephen Vincent Benet

A phrase may come to me as I am walking, and, once I write it down in my journal, the rest of the poem will unravel from that catalyst. — Stephen Vincent Benet

I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in. — Stephen Vincent Benet