Stephen Vincent Benet Quotes

It's something that I had been pushing down my whole life. The search for meaning, I guess, the whispering of the soul.

The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound.

I've never seen any life transformation that didn't begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

I think a novel has to be about where you are at a given moment in time. I think it really needs to represent some specific pain you're going through. it's not just a story.

I sometimes truly despair at ever being meaningfully altered and affected by the things I claim are so important to me.

Anybody can get lost in themselves.

Every man is crucified upon the cross of himself.

Identity has been such an explosive territory for me... so hard, so painful at times.

In life, there's a ladder sometimes, and maybe at the top, there's a mirror. You take a step up, then maybe three steps down... just because you don't want to face the decloaking in the mirror.

It feels weird to say there's more to me than that, like I'm being overdramatic, and a tear rolls down my cheek. But, no - I do like I feel like there's more to me than just baseball.

I'm not even sure who I really am sometimes.

There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve, then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tiny blasts on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.

My neediness is not a hole to be filled but something beneath the skin scratching to get out.

In the antiseptic world we try to purge ourselves of difficult things. Don't dwell on it, switch off the light and go home. But this is home. I have to be a home to myself. I am the place I come back to and I can't keep hiding difficult things in trunks. Soon the house will be full of trunks and I perched on top of them with the phone saying, "Yes, I'm fine, of course, I'm fine, everything's fine." The trunks shudder.

The Ideal is in thyself, the impediments too is in thyself.

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

You know, you struggle and cry and moan and thrash around and beat your head against the wall... and then you realize that you're just yourself, and you come to terms with yourself struggling. There are some serious, serious things to deal with in terms of the immensity of the suffering that we humans create for ourselves and for the world around us.

It's not easy to be Light when you've been Dark. It's almost too much to ask anyone. -Macon Ravenwood

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

But what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.

Don't try to change people. It won't work, and they will end up resenting you. Only God can change people!

You're dying with the way things are," Della Lee said harshly, causing Josey to lower the handful of popcorn she was about to put in her mouth. "You're going to lose yourself in this, Josey. It's going to happen if you don't change. I know. I lost myself trying to find happiness in things that didn't love me back.

Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.