Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Books are not men and yet they are alive.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.

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.

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!

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.

I am tired of loving a foreign muse.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Life was a storm to wander through.

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.

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

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