Stephen Crane Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion.

Stephen Crane
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

Stephen Crane
A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles.

Stephen Crane
And it was as if fate had betrayed the soldier. In death it exposed to his enemies that poverty which in life he had perhaps concealed from his friends.

Stephen Crane
The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

Stephen Crane
It perhaps might be said—if any one dared—that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of another.

Stephen Crane
A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

Stephen Crane
A serious prophet upon predicting a flood should be the first man to climb a tree. This would demonstrate that he was indeed a seer.

Stephen Crane
A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do something effective in the way of swamping boats.

Stephen Crane
Tell her this And more,— That the king of the seas Weeps too, old, helpless man. The bustling fates Heap his hands with corpses Until he stands like a child With surplus of toys.

Stephen Crane
None of them knew the color of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colors of the sea. The horizon narrowed and widened, and dipped and rose, and at all times its edge was jagged with waves that seemed thrust up in points like rocks.

Stephen Crane
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom —
A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Stephen Crane
When it came night, the white waves paced to and fro in the moonlight, and the wind brought the sound of the great sea's voice to the men on shore, and they felt that they could then be interpreters.

Stephen Crane
He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.

Stephen Crane
At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.

Stephen Crane
When the prophet, a complacent fat man, Arrived at the mountain-top He cried: "Woe to my knowledge! I intended to see good white lands And bad black lands— But the scene is grey.

Stephen Crane
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

Stephen Crane
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors.

Stephen Crane
He saw that it was an ironical thing for him to be running thus toward that which he had been at such pains to avoid.

Stephen Crane
There were many who went in huddled procession,They knew not wither,But, at any rate, success or calamityWould attend all in equality.There was one who sought a new road,He went into direful thickets,And ultimately he died thus, alone;But they said he had courage.

Stephen Crane
A very little boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honour of Rum Alley. He was throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row, who were circling madly about the heap and pelting him. His infantile countenance was livid with the fury of battle. His small body was writhing in the delivery of oaths.

Stephen Crane
I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
'Ah, God, take me from this place!'
A voice said, 'It is no desert.'
I cried, 'Well, But -
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.'
A voice said, 'It is no desert.'

Stephen Crane
The voice of God whispers in the heart
So softly
That the soul pauses,
Making no noise,
And strives for these melodies,
Distant, sighing, like faintest breath,
And all the being is still to hear.

Stephen Crane
Tradition, thou art for suckling children, Thou art the enlivening milk for babes, But no meat for men is in thee.

Stephen Crane
In the swirling rain that came at dusk the broad avenue glistened with that deep bluish tint which is so widely condemned when it is put into pictures.

Stephen Crane
There is nothing-
No life,
No joy,
No pain-
There is nothing save opinion,
And opinion be damned.

Stephen Crane
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers. Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: "Yes, but I love myself." A high cold star on a winter's night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

Stephen Crane
Unwind my riddle.
Cruel as hawks the hours fly;
Wounded men seldom come home to die;
The hard waves see an arm flung high;
Scorn hits strong because of a lie;
Yet there exists a mystic tie.
Unwind my riddle.

Stephen Crane
Sometimes, the most profound of awakenings come wrapped in the quietest of moments.

Stephen Crane
Should the wide world roll away Leaving black terror Limitless night, Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand Would be to me essential If thou and thy white arms were there And the fall to doom a long way.

Stephen Crane