Quotes by Stephen Vincent Benét

“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.””

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

“The ant finds kingdoms in a foot of ground.””

“Books are not men and yet they are alive, they are man's memory and his aspiration, the link between his present and his past, the tools he builds with.””

“All night long like a moving stain,(The trees are breaking, my son,)The black ghost wanders his house of pain.There is blood where his hand has lain.It is wrong he should wear a chain.(The sky is falling, my son.)””

“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!””

“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.””

“Oh, sure, he was a good business man. I got that in a minute. But, underneath all the externals, they were the same kind. It hadn't anything to do with the faithfulness or meanness. They were just the same breed of cats. If you're a dog and you fall in love with a cat, that's just your hard luck.””

“But then the money business began. You like to give a girl presents when you're in love”

“Of course, often enough, the people in books are poor. But then they're so darn poor, it's crazy. And, often enough, just when everything's at its worst, some handy little legacy comes along and the new life opens out before them right away, like a great big tulip. Well, I only had one legacy in my life and I know what I did with that. It darn near ruined me.””

“Then I'm the King of the Cats!””