I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.

Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of the imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save prose from itself.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orch-ard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night.

It's God - I recognised him from Blake's picture.

I don't like to see things on purpose. I like them to soak in. A friend . . . asked me to go to the top of the Empire State Building once, and I told him that he shouldn't treat New York as a sight-it's feeling, an emotional experience. And the same with every place else.

The chance is the remotest, Of its going much longer unnoticed, That I'm not keeping pace With the headlong human race

The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.