Quotes from Carl Sandburg

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

Tongues wrangled dark at a man. He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone. In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.

I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all.

There is only one man in the world and his name is All Men. There is only one woman in the world and her name is All Women. There is only one child in the world and the child's name is All Children.

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

Tell no man anything, for no man listens Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.

There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.

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

Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.

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

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

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

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

Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

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

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

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

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

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

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

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

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