Quotes from Carl Sandburg

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

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.

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.

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

Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.

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

Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.

Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

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

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

Poetry is a diary kept by a sea creature who lives on land and wishes he could fly.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air.

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

Money is power, freedom, a cushion, the root of all evil, the sum of blessings.

God, let me remember all good losers.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

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

Hope is an echo hope ties itself yonder yonder.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

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