Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes

We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost, Minute by minute, day by dragging day, In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways...

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.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Life was a storm to wander through.

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.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

Remember that when you say "I will have non 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.

Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you might die of the truth.

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.

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

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

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

Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.

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

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.

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.

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

One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

God pity us indeed, for we are human, And do not always see, The 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. Expect, Nor fruit nor blossom from a barren bough."