Top 90 Benet Quotes
#1. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#2. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#3. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#4. Treat a boy like a fool and he'll act like a fool, I say, but there's some folks need convincing.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#5. Trouble with women. Can't do any art and be married if you're in love with your wife.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#6. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#7. We cannot afford the creeping paralysis that destroys the effective will of democracy - the paralysis carried by hate and rancor, between class and class, person and person, party and party, as plague is carried through the streets of a town.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#8. Of all the Christbitten places in the two hemispheres, (Los Angeles) is the last curly kink in the pig's tail.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#9. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#10. Money is sullen And wisdom is sly, But youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#11. 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 Benet
#12. A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain, and eyes like burning antracite - that was Dan'l Webster in his prime.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#13. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#14. You can't depend on the kind of folks people think they are - you've got to go by what they do. And I wouldn't give much for a man that some folks hadn't thought was a fool, in his time.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#16. One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#17. Yes, Dan'l Webster's dead - or, at least, they buried him. But every time there's a thunderstorm around Marshfield, they say you can hear his rolling voice in the hollows of the sky.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#20. 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 Benet
#21. And now there is merely silence, silence, silence, saying all we did not know.
William Rose Benet
#22. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#24. It is forbidden to go east, but I have gone, forbidden to go on the great river, but I am there. Open your hearts, you spirits, and hear my song.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#25. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#28. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#29. Being Benedictine--a monastic or an oblate--means trying a little harder to show the courtesy of love for one another, to see Christ in the people with whom, we live, work and pray--and to look for Him even in the people with whom we disagree.
Benet Tvedten
#31. We need more drag king role models for all those interested in the art
BeBe Zahara Benet
#32. Something begins, begins;Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroadIn flesh and spirit and fire.Something is loosed to change the shaken world.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#33. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#34. There are many trials that seem hard to bear at first which prove true blessings later when we see of what false materials they were first composed.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#35. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#37. Don't seek God elsewhere. Seek God now, right here, in the routine things that have to be done. Find God in the ordinary circumstances of your life.
Benet Tvedten
#39. Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#40. Drag artists are more men than real men. You need a lot of courage, personality, and guts to go out there. Even if you look good or you look bad, you still need to have all of those things to be on stage. You're going to get criticized by everyone.
BeBe Zahara Benet
#42. Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!
Stephen Vincent Benet
#43. If two New Hampshiremen aren't a match for the devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#44. You cannot slay yourself in me, Nor I to all eternity Destroy my truest self in you.
William Rose Benet
#45. I think a blog is a catalyst for a number of possible kinds of writing besides being its own medium.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#46. When Daniel Boone goes by at night
The phantom deer arise
And all lost, wild America
Is burning in their eyes.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#49. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#50. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#52. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#53. Let us be bold enough and free enough to follow the great examples - the men of good will and honor who put aside little ways and petty hatreds to build the American dream.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#54. 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 Benet
#56. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#57. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#58. Sometimes a sign or a quote is simply interesting by itself and does not require anything beyond being framed on a page.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#60. You work hard, and you'll rise. But, if you've got any foolish notions, just knock them on the head and forget them.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#61. Let each one of us say, 'I am an American. I intend to stay an American. I will do my best to wipe from my heart hate, rancor and political prejudice. I will sustain my government. And, through good days or bad, I will try to serve my country.'
Stephen Vincent Benet
#62. I do think that the kind of writing that I do will always be around and printed in books, magazines, and now blogs.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#63. Conversion may mean changing one's mind, overcoming prejudices, looking at things differently. Someone has remarked that conversatio means never having to say, 'But we've always done it this way.
Benet Tvedten
#65. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#66. Broad-streeted Richmond ... The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#69. One cannot conclude that there are no great saints just because no great miracles are worked. The true estimate of life, after all, lies in acts of virtue, not in the display of miracles. There are many, Peter, who without performing miracles, are not at all inferior to those who perform them.
Benet Tvedten
#70. 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 Benet
#71. We cannot be a house divided - divided in will, divided in interest, divided in soul. We cannot be a house divided and live.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#72. When we react angrily or negatively about everything that happens to us, we're failing in patience.
Benet Tvedten
#73. Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years - a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#74. 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
#75. As for what you're calling hard luck - well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#76. There's nothing compared to the history of writing about the city of New York that you get, say, in Charles Reznikoff.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#77. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#78. I have fallen in love with American names, the sharp names that never get fat.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#80. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#82. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#83. Truth is a hard deer to hunt. If you eat too much truth at once, you may die of the truth.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#84. If the sum of living be love's fee,
Tremble. You are my one eternity.
Laura Benet
#85. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#86. You call my candidate a horse thief, and I call yours a lunatic, and we both of us know it's just till election day. It's an American custom, like eating corn on the cob. And, afterwards, we settle down quite peaceably and agree we've got a pretty good country - until next election.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#87. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#88. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
#89. 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!
Stephen Vincent Benet
#90. 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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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