Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Stephen Vincent Benet - Page 2

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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!