Quotes from Carl Sandburg

One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.

Mr. James Mooney investigated this interesting phenomenon and actually discovered the Seer, who proved to be an inoffensive visionary dwelling in a remote valley of the Southwest. This young man's life and theories (a full-blood, apparently untouched by Christian influence), curiously resembled those of Christ, and like the latter, he preached the doctrines of Nonresistance and the Brotherhood of Man. In this case our government played the part of Rome.

Here I saw a city rise and say to the peoples round world: Listen, I am strong, I know what I want.

Music is any sound you want to go on and on.

There are some people so lonely, they think God is lonely too-

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders:

When the rose's flash to the sunset Reels to the wrack and the twist, And the rose is a red bygone, When the face I love is going And the gate to the end shall clang, And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"— Maybe I'll tell you then— some other time.

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, And I will sit watching the sky tear off gray and gray And the letter I wait for won't come.

Poetry is the Path on the Rainbow by which the soul climbs; it lays hold on the Friend of the Soul of Man. Such exalted states are held to be protective and curative. Medicine men sing for their patients, and, in times of war, wives gather around the Chief's woman and sing for the success of their warriors. Calling on Zeus by the names of Victory as Euripides puts it.

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

Maybe the morning sun is a five-cent yellow balloon, And the evening stars the joke of a God gone crazy. Maybe the mothers of the world, And the life that pours from their torsal folds— Maybe it's all a lie sworn by liars, And a God with a cackling laughter says: "I, the Almighty God, I have made all this, I have made it for kaisers, czars and kings.

Let us go out in the fog, John, let us roll up our raincoat collars and go on the streets where men are sneering at the kings.

There is only one child in the world and the child's name is all children.

I know of no task so salutory to the poet who would, first of all, put himself in touch with the resident genius of his own land.

Here is dust remembers it was a rose one time and lay in a woman's hair. Here is dust remembers it was a woman one time and in her hair lay a rose. Oh things one time dust, what else now is it you dream and remember of old days? ? Carl Sandburg, "Dust," The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg . (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition January 6, 2003) Originally published 1950.

You must expect to be in several lost causes before you die.

SONG OF THE MAN WHO WAS TO BE HUNG The thunders will take me home, whenever I mind to go home, my friends, and the wind it will take me home, too.

I HAVE ransacked the encyclopedias And slid my fingers among topics and titles Looking for you. And the answer comes slow. There seems to be no answer. Old-fashioned Requited Love I shall ask the next banana peddler the who and the why of it. Or—the iceman with his iron tongs gripping a clear cube in summer sunlight—maybe he will know.

I will be back soon if not sooner and when I come back I will return.

Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet.

The lawyers know a dead man's thoughts too well.

And the ring of your heart-deep laughter: It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.

What is a stratosphere fourteen miles from the earth or a sunken glass house on the sea-bottom amid fish and feather- stars unless a bet that man can shove on beyond yesterday's record of man the hoper, the believer?

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.