Quotes from Carl Sandburg

Seine Kleider, die den Zweck hatten, Kälte und Hitze von ihm abzuhalten, schienen zu flüstern: Er zog uns an, während er mit seinen Gedanken ganz wo anders war.

The moon is a cadaver and a dusty mummy and a damned rotten investment.

8819Passers-by, Out of your many faces Flash memories to me Now at the day end Away from the sidewalks Where your shoe soles traveled And your voices rose and blent To form the city's afternoon roar Hindering an old silence.

She knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran.

The dead say nothing And the dead know much And the dead hold under their tongues A locked-up story.

Summer Stars - 1878-1967 Bend low again, night of summer stars. So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl, So near you are, summer stars, So near, strumming, strumming, So lazy and hum-strumming.

whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather … and burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons

Shall the squid have praise or blame for being a squid? Shall the bird have compliments for being born with wings?

There are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

There are hungers for a nameless bread out of the dust of the hard earth, out of the blaze of the calm sun.

Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped around your tongue today And broken to shape and thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now.

The wind carves sand into shapes Endless the fresh designs, Wind and ice patient beyond telling. Ice can tip mountains over, Ice the giant beyond measure. And the sun governs valley lights, Transforms hats into shoes and back again Before we are through any long looking.

The sun touches them off with shot gold of an evening, with a mother's grey eyes singing to her children.

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

I told her I felt kind of restless about the new poetry and I had high hopes the new poetry one way or another would be able to get at the real stuff of American life, slipping its fingers into the steel meshes and copper coils of it under the streets and over the houses and people and factories and groceries, conceding a fair batting average to Dante and Keats for what they wrote about love and roses and the moon.

But leave me a little love, A voice to speak to me in the day end, A hand to touch me in the dark room Breaking the long loneliness. In the dusk of day-shapes Blurring the sunset, One little wandering, western star Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. Let me go to the window, Watch there the day-shapes of dusk And wait and know the coming Of a little love. —Carl Sandburg, from "At the Window," Chicago Poems (Dover Publications, 1994)

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. –

An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, 'Come and find me, come and find me'.

Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders.

Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.

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

A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on.

A baby is Godís opinion that life should go on.

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