Stephen Crane Quotes

Every sin is the result of a collaboration

Mother, whose heart hung humble as a button the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.

"A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from his new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man's hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence - the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown.

("An Episode Of War")"

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

Whatever he had learned of himself was of no avail. He was an unknown quantity.

He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.

"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 brick 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 Man Adrift On A Slim Spar"

A man adrift on a slim spar
A horizon smaller than the rim of a bottle
Tented waves rearing lashy dark points
The near whine of froth in circles.
God is cold.

The incessant raise and swing of the sea
And growl after growl of crest
The sinkings, green, seething, endless
The upheaval half-completed.
God is cold.

The seas are in the hollow of The Hand;
Oceans may be turned to a spray
Raining down through the stars
Because of a gesture of pity toward a babe.
Oceans may become gray ashes,
Die with a long moan and a roar
Amid the tumult of the fishes
And the cries of the ships,
Because The Hand beckons the mice.
A horizon smaller than a doomed assassin's cap,
Inky, surging tumults
A reeling, drunken sky and no sky
A pale hand sliding from a polished spar.
God is cold.

The puff of a coat imprisoning air:
A face kissing the water-death
A weary slow sway of a lost hand
And the sea, the moving sea, the sea.
God is cold.

The dead man and the living man exchanged a long look. Then the youth cautiously put one hand behind him and brought it against a tree. Leaning upon this he retreated, step by step, with his face still toward the thing. He feared that if he turned his back the body might spring up and stealthily pursue him.

Why — why — ” stammered the youth struggling with his balking tongue.

There were many who went in huddled procession,
They knew not wither,
But, at any rate, success or calamity
Would 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.

The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, Was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds. "Ha," he said, "I see that none has passed here In a long time." Later he saw that each weed Was a singular knife. "Well," he mumbled at last, "Doubtless there are other roads."

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.

What a woman says doesn't amount to shucks. It's the way she says it — that's what counts.