Quote

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

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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
Hate
Shadow
Totems
Black
Neither
Sorcery
Real
Pieces
Cloth
Something
Fight
Flag
Make
Word
Flags
Love
Fighting
Shadows
Sound
Stones
War
Piece

More quotes by 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.
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One cannot balance tragedy in the scales Unless one weighs it with the tragic heart.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Money is sullen And wisdom is sly, But youth is the pollen That blows through the sky And does not ask why.
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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.
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Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
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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.
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The art finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a planet unvexxed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color or theory.
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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Dreaming men are haunted men.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in.
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Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books!
Stephen Vincent Benet