Stella Benson Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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.

Stella Benson
Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten.

Stella Benson
You want the vote so badly that you think it worth while to become hysterical over it.' 'There is not much hysteria in the movement, only hysteria is the thing that strikes a hysterical press as most worthy of note.

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

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

Stella Benson
Americans were people who wanted to leave every place better than they found it, to leave every man more of a man than they found him.... 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
Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys.

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

Stella Benson
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.

Stella Benson
The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the imaginative fling it joyfully behind them.

Stella Benson
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
A committee, of course, exists for the purpose of damping enthusiasms.

Stella Benson
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
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.

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

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

Stella Benson
Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.

Stella Benson
He was always willing to be the text of his own oratory.

Stella Benson
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
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed — or cursed — with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.

Stella Benson
The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it.

Stella Benson
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