Quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet

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

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.

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

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.

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

The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.

Rest you, my enemy, Slain without fault, Life smacks but tastelessly Lacking your salt! Stuck in a bog whence naught May catapult me, Come from the grave, long-sought, Come and insult me!

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.

All night long like a moving stain, (The trees are breaking, my son,) The black ghost wanders his house of pain. There is blood where his hand has lain. It is wrong he should wear a chain. (The sky is falling, my son.)

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, As mountainous-deep, as flowered with blue rivers, Thirsty with deserts, buried under snows, As native as the shape of Navajo quivers, And native, too, as the sea-voyaged rose.

Yes, Dan'l Webster is dead — or, at least, they buried him.

Then I'm the King of the Cats!

But then the money business began. You like to give a girl presents when you're in love—you like to do things right. Well, Lord knows, Eva was no gold-digger—she was as likely to be pleased with a soda as a pair of imported gloves. On the other hand, she was as likely to be pleased with the gloves.

Oh, sure, he was a good business man. I got that in a minute. But, underneath all the externals, they were the same kind. It hadn't anything to do with the faithfulness or meanness. They were just the same breed of cats. If you're a dog and you fall in love with a cat, that's just your hard luck.

Of course, often enough, the people in books are poor. But then they're so darn poor, it's crazy. And, often enough, just when everything's at its worst, some handy little legacy comes along and the new life opens out before them right away, like a great big tulip. Well, I only had one legacy in my life and I know what I did with that. It darn near ruined me.

I figured I could easily live a year on the twelve hundred, and, at first, I thought of France. But there'd be the nuisance of learning frog-talk and the passage there and back. Besides, I wanted to be near a big library. My novel was going to be about the American Revolution, if you can picture it. I'd read "Henry Esmond" over and over and I wanted to write a book like that.

Stonewall Jackson, wrapped in his beard and his silence.

American Muse, whose strong and diverse heartSo many men have tried to understandBut only made it smaller with their art,Because you are as various as your land.

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

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.

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.

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.

You can weigh John Brown's body well enough,But how and in what balance weigh John Brown?

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.