Stephen Vincent Benét > Quotes

“There is a wilderness we walk alone
However well-companioned”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Western Star

“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 Benét

“Dreaming men are haunted men.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body

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

“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

“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 Benét

“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 Benét

“Of all the Christbitten places in the two hemispheres, (Los Angeles) is the last curly kink in the pig's tail.”
― 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 Benét

“The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body

“Truth is a hard dear to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, By the Waters of Babylon

“Life is not lost by dying. Life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day...”
― Stephen V. Benet

“Books are not men and yet they are alive, they are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét

“Rest you, my enemy,
Slain without fault,
Life smacks but tastelessly
Lacking your salt!
Stuck in a bog whence naught
May catapult me,
Come from the grave, long-sought,
Come and insult me!”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Young Adventure

“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,

As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers,
Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows,
As native as the shape of Navajo quivers,
And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body

“All night long like a moving stain,
(The trees are breaking, my son,)
The black ghost wanders his house of pain.
There is blood where his hand has lain.

It is wrong he should wear a chain.
(The sky is falling, my son.)”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown's Body

“Then I'm the King of the Cats!”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, The King of the Cats

“Oh, sure, he was a good business man. I got that in a minute. But, underneath all the externals, they were the same kind. It hadn't anything to do with the faithfulness or meanness. They were just the same breed of cats. If you're a dog and you fall in love with a cat, that's just your hard luck.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Glamour

“Yes, Dan’l Webster is dead — or, at least, they buried him.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, The Devil and Daniel Webster

“But then the money business began. You like to give a girl presents when you're in love—you like to do things right. Well, Lord knows, Eva was no gold-digger—she was as likely to be pleased with a soda as a pair of imported gloves. On the other hand, she was as likely to be pleased with the gloves.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Glamour

“I figured I could easily live a year on the twelve hundred, and, at first, I thought of France. But there'd be the nuisance of learning frog-talk and the passage there and back. Besides, I wanted to be near a big library. My novel was going to be about the American Revolution, if you can picture it. I'd read "Henry Esmond" over and over and I wanted to write a book like that.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Glamour

“Of course, often enough, the people in books are poor. But then they're so darn poor, it's crazy. And, often enough, just when everything's at its worst, some handy little legacy comes along and the new life opens out before them right away, like a great big tulip. Well, I only had one legacy in my life and I know what I did with that. It darn near ruined me.”
― Stephen Vincent Benét, Glamour