Stella Benson (6 January 1892 – 7 December 1933) was an English feminist, novelist, poet, and travel writer.
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.
Family jokes, though rightly cursed by strangers, are the bond that keeps most families alive.
a committee, of course, exists for the purpose of damping enthusiasms.
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.
The Law likes to be argued with. Take away words and where is the Law? Silence always annoys it.
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.
Call no man a foe, but never love a stranger.
Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it.
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.
Islands are gregarious animals, they decorate the ocean in conveys.
You can't discover one foot of clay on an idol without suspecting the other.
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.
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.
The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the imaginative fling it joyfully behind them.
Unpopularity is a excellent salve to the conscience; it is delicious to be misunderstood.
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.
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.
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.
Music is the ethereal connection between this world and the other.
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.