Quotes from Carl Sandburg

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Nothing happens... but first a dream.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.

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.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes, so live not in your yesterdays, no just for tomorrow, but in the here and now. Keep moving and forget the post mortems; and remember, no one can get the jump on the future.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar.

Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.

Let your heart look on white sea spray and be lonely. Love is a fool star. You and a ring of stars may mention my name and then forget me. Love is a fool star.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.

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.

There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.

I am an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.

The past is a bucket of ashes

Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted

After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars

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