Quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet

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

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

Icarus, Icarus, though the end is piteous, Yet forever, yea, forever we shall see thee rising thus, See the first supernal glory, not the ruin hideous.

Life is not lost by dying! Life is lost Minute by minute, day by dragging day, In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways, The smooth appeasing compromises of time.

For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns Without name, without resurrection, without stars, His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour With the smell of his many prisons -- John Smith, John Doe, John Nobody -- oh, crack your mind for his name!

I'm waiting.... For something new and strange, Something I've dreamt about in some deep sleep, Truer than any waking.

Youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why.

I have fallen in love with American names, The sharp, gaunt 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.

When gods war with gods, they use weapons we do not know.

Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a pane unvexed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color, or theory.

There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too.

Life was a storm to wander through.

You have taken my heart from me, sea-born eyes. You have taken it, yes, but I do not know. There are too many roads where I must go. There are too many beds where I have slept For a night unweeping, to quit unwept, And it needs a king to marry the sea.

I have been in the Place of the Gods and seen it! Now slay me, if it is the law -- but still I know they were men.

We thought we were done with these things but we were wrong. We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom. We thought the long train would run to the end of Time. We thought the light would increase. Now the long train stands derailed and the bandits loot it. Now the boar and the asp have power in our time. Now the night rolls back on the West and the night is solid. Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.

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.

They are our last frontier. They shot the railway-train when it first came, And when the Fords first came, they shot the Fords. It could not save them. They are dying now Of being educated, which is the same. One need not weep romantic tears for them, But 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.

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.

Honesty rare as a man without self-pity, kinders as large and plain as a prairie wind.

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.

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.

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.

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

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