Stella Benson Quotes

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 canaary as a substitute for a husband.

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.

We travel because we do not know. We know that we do not know the best before we start. That is why we start. But we forget that we do not know the worst either. That is why we come back.

Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it.

I want to introduce you to Jay, a 'bus-conductor and an idealist. She is not the heroine, but the most constantly apparent woman in this book. I cannot introduce you to a heroine because I have never met one.

London knows much, and every momeny she learns a new thing, but this she shall never learn - that the sun shines all day and the moon all night on the silver tiles of her dark house, and that the young months climb her walls, and run singing in and out between her chimneys...

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows.

Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.

There pass the trav'lling dreams, and these
My soul adores

My soundless feet shall fly among the runners
Through the red thunders of a Zeppelin raid,
My still voice cheer the Anti-Aircraft gunners,
The fires shall glare - but I shall cast no shade.

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. 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.

To-day she had watched magic dancing in a mackintosh, and she was at a loss.

Cows in India occupy the same position in society as women did in England before they got the vote. Woman was revered but not encouraged. Her life was one long obstacle race owing to the anxiety of man to put pedestals at her feet. While she was falling over the pedestals she was soothingly told that she must occupy a Place Apart - and indeed, so far Apart did her place prove to be that it was practically out of earshot. The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. You practically never see a happy cow in India.

It is a place of fine weather, and this is a book of fine weather, a book written in Spring. I will not remember the winter and the rain. It was the Spring that brought Sarah Brown to Mitten Island, and the Spring that first showed her magic. It was the Spring that awoke her on her first morning in the House of Living Alone.

Her grammar in moments of emergency always impressed Kew.

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.

Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.

The hoarse church-bells of London ring;
The hoarser horns of London croak;
The poor brown lives of London cling
About the poor brown streets like smoke;
The deep air stands above my roof
Like water, to the floating stars.
My friend and I - we sit aloof -
We sit and smile, and bind our scars.

The moment of cocoa-drinking was always the moment of confidences.

There are some people who can never see a little cloud of fantasy float across the horizon of their dreams without building a heavy castle in the air upon it, and bringing it to earth.

Come home, come home, you million ghosts,
The honest years shall make amends,
The sun and moon shall be your hosts,
The everlasting hills your friends.

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.

The sun was like a word written between the sea and the sky, a word that was swallowed up by the sea before any man had time to read it.

You can't discover one foot of clay on an idol without suspecting the other.

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.

Music is the ethereal connection between this world and the other.

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 neighbor? ... The real Love knows her neighbor face to face, and laughs with him and weeps with him, and eats and drinks with him, so that at last, when his black day dawns, she may share with him, not what she can spare, but all that she has.

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.

Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people - the autobiographists and the biographists.

The music paled like a candle and went out ...

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.

That sea - that mother of a million summers,
Who bore, with melody, a million springs,
Shall sing for my enchantment...

Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys.

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.