Quote

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

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Stephen Vincent Benet
Age: 44 †
Born: 1898
Born: July 22
Died: 1943
Died: March 13
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Bethlehem
Pennsylvania
Stephen Vincent Benet
Good
Defeat
Victory
Fact
Idea
Facts
May
Ideas
Even
Survive

More quotes by Stephen Vincent Benet

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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
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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
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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
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Grant us a common faith that we shall know bread and peace-that we shall know justice and righteousness, freedom and security, an equal opportunity and an equal chance to do our best not only in our own lands, but throughout the world. And in that faith let us march toward the clean world our hands can make.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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Our fathers and ourselves sowed dragon's teeth. Our children know and suffer the armed men.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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When Daniel Boone goes by at night The phantom deer arise And all lost, wild America Is burning in their eyes.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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
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Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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
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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
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Remember that when you say I will have non 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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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
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Books are not men and yet they are alive.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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
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Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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