Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

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

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

Dreaming men are haunted men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp, gaunt names that never get fat.

I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp names that never get fat, The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims, The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat, Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

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.

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.

Seine and Piave are silver spoons, But the spoonbowl-metal is thin and worn

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

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

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.

The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

I had lost something in my youth and made money instead.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 prophesy, That 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.

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

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.

Life was a storm to wander through.

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."

Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.

Something begins, begins; Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroad, In flesh and spirit and fire. Something is loosed to change the shaken world.

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