Quote

Something begins, begins Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroad, In flesh and spirit and fire. Something is loosed to change the shaken world.

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
World
Abroad
Begins
Flesh
Walks
Fire
Starlit
Spirit
Loosed
Change
Sunlit
Something
Shaken

More quotes by 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.
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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 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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Books are not men and yet they are alive.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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Outcasts of war, misfits, rebellious souls, Seekers of some vague kingdom in the stars - They hide out in the hills and stir up trouble, Call themselves prophets, too, and prophesy, That something new is coming to the world, The Lord knows what! Well, it's a long time coming, And, meanwhile, we're the wheat between the stones.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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I admire the attention other writers can give to the world we're walking in.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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.
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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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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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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Grant us brotherhood, not only for this day but for all our years - a brotherhood not of words but of acts and deeds.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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.
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
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Dreaming men are haunted men.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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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.
Stephen Vincent Benet
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Honesty is as rare as a man without self-pity.
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