English novelist (1892-1933)
The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
And you shall seek me till you reach
The tangled tide advancing,
And you shall find upon the beach
The traces of my dancing
STELLA BENSON
Twenty
This is not a real book. It does not deal with real people, nor should it be read by real people. But there are in the world so many real books already written for the benefit of real people, and there are still so many to be written, that I cannot believe that a little alien book such as this, written for the magically-inclined minority, can be considered a trespasser.
STELLA BENSON
Living Alone
Now there is hardly anything but magic abroad before seven o'clock in the morning. Only the disciples of magic like getting their feet wet, and being furiously happy on an empty stomach.
STELLA BENSON
Living Alone
What is this Charity, this clinking of money between strangers, and when did Charity cease to be a comforting and secret thing between one friend and another? Does Love make her voice heard through a committee, does Love employ an almoner to convey her message to her neighbour?
STELLA BENSON
Living Alone
The more committees you belong to, the less of ordinary life you will understand. When your daily round becomes nothing more than a daily round of committees you might as well be dead.
STELLA BENSON
Living Alone
Love is a farthing piece, a bloody bribe pressed in the palm of God and thrown away.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
It's very wrong to take less money than you're worth.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
To have refused love is very much more picturesque than not to have been offered it.
STELLA BENSON
Pipers and a Dancer
There is the track my feet have worn
By which my fate may find me:
From that dim place where I was born
Those footprints run behind me.
STELLA BENSON
Twenty
The eagle and the artichoke are equally alive--and perhaps my way of life is nearer to the eagle's than the artichoke's.
STELLA BENSON
The Man Who Missed the Bus
Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys.
STELLA BENSON
I Pose
Always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew.
STELLA BENSON
The Poor Man
The sun was like an angel with a flaming sword. The angel dipped his feet into the sea.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Seek not the best, the best is better hidden.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
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
Go forth with crowds; in loneliness is danger.
STELLA BENSON
This Is the End
Three things the sea shall never end,
Three things shall mock its power:
My singing soul, my Secret Friend,
And this, my perfect hour.
STELLA BENSON
Twenty
Nearly everybody in San Francisco writes poetry. Few San Franciscans would admit this, but most of them would rather like to have their productions accidentally discovered.
STELLA BENSON
The Poor Man