English novelist (1892-1933)
War is like air, in every house, in every land, on every sea.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Tonight the swinging stars shall plumb
The silence of the sky.
STELLA BENSON
Twenty
London is a friend whom I can leave knowing without doubt that she will be the same to me when I return, to-morrow or forty years hence, and that, if I do not return, she will sing the same song to inheritors of my happy lot in future generations. Always, whether sleeping or waking, I shall know that in Spring the sun rides over the silver streets of Kensington, and that in the Gardens the shorn sheep find very green pasture. Always the plaited threads of traffic will wind about the reel of London; always as you up Regent Street from Pall Mall and look back, Westminster will rise with you like a dim sun over the horizon of Whitehall. That dive down Fleet Street and up to the black and white cliffs of St. Paul's will for ever bring to mind some rumour of romance.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
I will repent me of my ways;
I will come here and bury
Five thousand odd superfluous days
Beneath a flow'ring cherry.
STELLA BENSON
"The Orchard", Twenty
The men of the Foreign Legion bring their own worlds with them from their own places; their only common ground is intoxication.
STELLA BENSON
Pipers and a Dancer
I want to go out into the country, I want to thread the pale Spring air, and hear the lambs cry. I want to brush my face against the grass, and wade in a wave of bluebells.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
They were not spontaneous people. They were born with too great a love of words, a passion for drama at the expense of truth, and a habit of overweighting common life with romance.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Men are proud of being men, and that is one of the greatest virtues.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people -- the autobiographists and the biographists.
STELLA BENSON
Pipers and a Dancer
My yesterday has gone, has gone and left me tired,
And now tomorrow comes and beats upon the door;
So I have built Today, the day that I desired,
Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more.
STELLA BENSON
"The Secret Day", Twenty
Man is potentially a son, and woman is potentially a mother; woman depends on the dependence of man. The spinster, if pathetic at all, is pathetic because she has no one to look after, not because there is no one to look after her. Bear in mind that the conventional spinster keeps a canary as a substitute for a husband.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
There are few penances easier than early rising on board ship. There are no inducements to stay upon the implacable plane that is your bunk, in the hot square cube that is your cabin.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Knowledge is but a painful effort wasted,
A bitter drowning in a bitter sea.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
There is always a romance that we leave behind in London, and always London enlocks that flower for us, and keeps it fresh, so that when we come back we have our romance again.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Americans could open doors to almost all that was admirable--it was their misfortune, not their fault, that movies and victrolas and advertisements squeezed in when they opened the door.
STELLA BENSON
Pipers and a Dancer
There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of workers in the world, the people who do all the work, and the people who think they do all the work. The latter class is generally the busiest, the former never have time to be busy.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Trees, skies, valleys mountains, seen through the rain-spotted windshield, were like a distorted, stippled landscape painted by a beginner who has not yet learned to wring living colour from his palette.
STELLA BENSON
The Desert Islander
After all, the past is such a little thing, one can drown it in a drop. And the future is so big.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose