Quotes from Carl Sandburg

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the women don't get you then the whiskey must.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

Our lives are like a candle in the wind.

I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold On a dream she wants.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.

I am stone and steel of your sleeping numbers; I remember all you forget. I will die as many times as you make me over again.

There is only one child in the world and the Child's name is All Children.

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.

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

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself

God, let me remember all good losers.

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it

I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them. And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river and I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

a women is like a tea bag.it's only when she is in hot water that you realize how strong she is.

Didn't you tie the mittens on her feet (Wednesday Evening's) extra special nice? Yes--she is an extra special nice pigeon. She cries for pity when she wants pity. And she shuts her eyes when she doesn't want to look at you. And if you look deep in her eyes when her eyes are open you will see lights there exactly like the lights on the pastures and the meadows when the mist is drifting on a Wednesday evening just between the twilight and gloaming.

Somebody's little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.

Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.

There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere

Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning...proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.