Carl Sandburg Quotes

159 Sourced Quotes

I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.

Carl Sandburg
The single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other.

Carl Sandburg
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.

Carl Sandburg
The street cars swing at a curve,
The middle class passengers witness low life.
The car windows frame low life all day in pictures.

Carl Sandburg
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down. And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

Carl Sandburg
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

Carl Sandburg
Man's life? A candle in the wind, hoar-frost on stone.

Carl Sandburg
Slang is language that takes off its coat, spits on its hands, and goes to work.

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg
If she [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

Carl Sandburg
There is only one child in the world and the Child's name is All Children.

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

Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over the harbor and city
on silent haunches, and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

Carl Sandburg
To those who had ordered them to death one of them said: 'We die because the people are asleep... you will die because the people will awaken'.

Carl Sandburg
To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

Carl Sandburg
Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.

Carl Sandburg
A tough will counts. So does desire.So does a rich soft wanting.Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

Carl Sandburg
People lie because they don't remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can't help making a story better than it was the way it happened.

Carl Sandburg
Out of great Russia came three
dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die
for: Bread, Peace, Land.

Carl Sandburg
The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time

Carl Sandburg
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg
The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading "Keep Off.

Carl Sandburg
In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are a series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.

Carl Sandburg
I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

Carl Sandburg