Carl Sandburg Quotes

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg. And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years,and passengers ask the conductor- What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

Always the path of American destiny has been into the unknown. Always there arose enough reserves of strength, balances of sanity, portions of wisdom to carry the nation through to a fresh start with ever-renewing vitality.

I am! I have come through! I belong!

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is romance and big things and real dreams that never go smash.

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.

Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely. Love is a fool star. You and a ring of stars may mention my name and then forget me. Love is a fool star.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.

Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?'...If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time-the stuff of life

Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

The fog comes on little cat feet.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Time says hush: by the gong of time you live. Listen and you hear time saying you were silent long before you came to life and you will again be silent long after you leave it, why not be a little silent now? Hush yourself, noisy little man. Time hushes all: the gong of time rang for you to come out of the hush and you were born. The gong of time will ring for you to go back to the same hush you came from. Winners and losers, the weak and the strong, those who say little and try to say it well, and those who babble and prattle their lives away, time hushes all.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.

Gather the stars if you wish it so Gather the songs and keep them. Gather the faces of women. Gather for keeping years and years. And then... Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye. Let the stars and songs go. Let the faces and years go. Loosen your hands and say good-bye.

For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along.

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

And how should a beautiful, ignorant stream of water know it heads for an early release — out across the desert, running toward the Gulf, below sea level, to murmur its lullaby, and see the Imperial Valley rise out of burning sand with cotton blossoms, wheat, watermelons, roses, how should it know?

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Whenever a people or an institution forget its hard beginnings, it is beginning to decay.

Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damned hard.

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.

An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.

To be a good loser is to learn how to win.

Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.