Carl Sandburg Quotes

159 Sourced Quotes

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Carl Sandburg
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last answers. Go running back to dust and mist.

Carl Sandburg
Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.

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

Carl Sandburg
So I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them: Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Carl Sandburg
There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,
The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.
A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest
corner of it.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.

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

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

Carl Sandburg
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?

Carl Sandburg
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.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

Carl Sandburg
There are dreams stronger than death. Men and women die holding these dreams.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

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

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Carl Sandburg
History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

Carl Sandburg
The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

Carl Sandburg
If you ask your mother for one fried egg for breakfast and she gives you two fried eggs and you eat both of them, who is better in arithmetic, you or your mother?

Carl Sandburg
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

Carl Sandburg
The sea folds away from you like a mystery. You can look and look at it and mystery never leaves it.

Carl Sandburg
The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas.
Soldiers tied rags on their feet.
Red footprints wrote on the snow...

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

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

Carl Sandburg
Freedom is baffling: men having it often know not they have it till it is gone and they no longer have it.

Carl Sandburg
Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

Carl Sandburg
The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

Carl Sandburg