Quotes from Carl Sandburg

The worn tired stars say you shall die early and die dirty. The clean cold stars say you shall die late and die clean. The runaway stars say you shall never die at all, never at all.

Get off this estate. What for? Because it's mine. Where did you get it? From my father. Where did he get it? From his father. And where did he get it? He fought for it. Well, I'll fight you for it.

Le poete est un animal marin qui vit sur terre et qui voudrait voler.

The books awed her by size, thickness, the staggering mass of lines and words to read before she could read all of them. Then having read all of the books must she carry in her head all that knowledge from the books? This too staggered her. Wouldn't my head feel queer? she asked Elder Brewster. Wouldn't my head feel heavy carrying so much knowledge? Could any of it spill out if there was too much?

To know silence perfectly is to know music.

They are lovely pigeons to look at and their eyes are full of lessons to learn.. They came back yesterday, they came back home, was the answer. They came back limping on their feet with their toes turned in so far they nearly turned backward. Every day the last six days I get a telegram, six telegrams from six pigeons--and at last they come home.

Night from a railroad car window is a great, dark, soft thing Broken across with slashes of light.

Why does a hearse horse snicker, hauling a lawyer away?

I cannot tell you now; When the wind's drive and whirl Blow me along no longer, And the wind's a whisper at last - Maybe I'll tell you then some other time.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.

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

A tough will counts. So does desire. So does a rich soft wanting. Without rich wanting nothing arrives.

The fog comes on little cat feet.

The doorknobs open the doors. The windows are always either open or shut. We are always either upstairs or downstairs in this house. Everything is the same as it always was.

It's going to come out all right—do you know? The sun, the birds, the grass—they know. They get along—and we'll get along. Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting And the letter you wait for won't come, 5 And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray And the letter I wait for won't come.

Blowing,Blowing The gray slabs Will lose you the winds will flick you away In a whiff

Death comes once, let it be easy.

Enough small empty boxes thrown into a big empty box fill it full.

Let only the young come, Says the sea. Let them kiss my face And hear me. I am the last word And I tell Where storms and stars come from.

I speak of new cities and new people I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west. I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of tomorrows. a sky of tomorrows. I am a brother of the cornhuskers who say at sundown: Tomorrow is a day." - Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers

Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you'll never read him unless you consider rainbows.

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.

What of the Athenian last year on whose bosom a committee hung a medal to say to the world here is a champion heavyweight poet? He stood on a two-masted schooner and flung his medal far out on the sea bosom. "And why not? Has anybody ever given the ocean a medal? Who of the poets equals the music of the sea? And where is a symbol of the people unless it is the sea?

Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one another's throats for room to stand and among them all are not two thumbs alike.