111 Quotes by Stephen Vincent Benét

There is a wilderness we walk aloneHowever well-companioned

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,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.

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.

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

The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

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.

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

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