Stephen Vincent Benet Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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 think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Life was a storm to wander through.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.

Dreaming men are haunted men.

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

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

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

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!

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.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

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

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.

Life is not lost -dying; life is lost minute -minute, day -dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

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

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

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.

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.

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.