Carl Sandburg Famous Quotes
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The drum in a dream pounds loud to the dreamer.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
The past is a bucket of ashes
I doubt if you can have a truly wild party without liquor.
The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.
When one has the right swing and enthusiasm, selling is not unlike hunting, a veritable sport. To scare up the game by preliminary talk and to know how long to follow it, to lose your gain through poorly directed argument, to hang on to game that finally eludes, to boldly confront, to quickly circle around, to keep on the trail, tireless and keen, till you have bagged some orders, there is some satisfaction in returning at night, tired of the trail, but proud of the days work done.
Nothing happens... but first a dream
The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.
If [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.
God, let me remember all good losers.
Time is a sandpile we run our fingers in.
A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.
In democracy both a deep reverence and a sense of the comic are requisite.
When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
An inquiry which I once made into the psychology of the Indian sign language with a view to discovering a possible relation between it and Greek manual gesture as displayed in ancient graphic art, led to the conclusion that Indian rhythms arise rather in the centre of self-preservation than of self-consciousness. Which is only another way of saying that poetry is valued primarily by the aboriginal for the reaction it produces within himself rather than for any effect he is able to produce on others by means of it.
Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
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,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
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 cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.
The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper
sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.
The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes,
new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind,
and the old things go, not one lasts.
Why did he write to her, "I can't live without you?" And why did she write to him "I can't live without you?" For he went west and she went east and they both lived.
The people know what the land knows.
I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
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.
A tree is best measured when it is down - and so it is with people.
Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn.
Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
Alike and ever alike, we are on all continents in the need of love, food, clothing, work, speech, worship, sleep, games, dancing, fun. From tropics to arctics humanity live with these needs so alike, so inexorably alike.
And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.
The impact of television on our culture is ... indescribable. There's a certain sense in which it is nearly as important as the invention of printing.
Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.
There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.
Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.
Now I am here - now read me - give me a name.
It is the business of little minds to shrink.
When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease but the quacking duck gets shot.
Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.
There is no song to your singing.
Tell no man anything, for no man listens
Yet hold thy lips ready to speak.
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.
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.
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.
Blowing,Blowing
The gray slabs
Will lose you
the winds will flick you away
In a whiff
Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.
Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.
Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had 'Loneliness' and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.
Newspapers tell beforehand what is going to happen - maybe.
Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it runs by.
One of the great Confederate combat leaders, General John B. Gordon, had sat at his horse and spoken farewell to his men. Some he had seen weeping as they folded burnt and shot-pierced battle flags and laid them on the stacked arms of surrender. As he told his troops his own grief he tried to give them hope to rebuild out of the poverty and ashes to which many would return. Gordon would never forget a Kentucky father who lost two sons, one dying for the North, the other for the South. Over the two graves of his soldier boys the father set up a joint monument inscribed God knows which was right.
Money buys everything except love, personality, freedom, immortality, silence, peace.
Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.
I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.
There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
Somebody's little girl- how easy it is to make a sob story over who she once was and who she now is.
Gather the stars if you wish it so Gather the songs and keep them. Gather the faces of women. Gather for keeping years and years. And then ... Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye. Let the stars and songs go. Let the faces and years go. Loosen your hands and say good-bye.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
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.
Tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers.
A man must find time for himself. Time is what we spend our lives with. If we are not careful we find others spending it for us ... It is necessary now and then for a man to go away by himself and experience loneliness; to sit on a rock in the forest and to ask of himself, 'Who am I, and where have I been, and where am I going?' ... If one is not careful, one allows diversions to take up one's time - the stuff of life.
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.
Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
Under the summer roses When the flagrant crimson Lurks in the dusk Of the wild red leaves, Love, with little hands, Comes and touches you With a thousand memories, And asks you Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
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.
Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
The shovel is brother to the gun.
Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.
I am an idealist. I believe in everything - I am only looking for proofs.
If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell
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.
The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading Keep Off.
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 big shoulders.
POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.
One summer afternoon I came home and found all the umbrellas sitting in the kitchen, with straw hats on, telling who they are.
...
The umbrella that peels the potatoes with a pencil and makes a pink ink with the peelings stood up and said, "I am the umbrella that peels the potatoes with a pencil and makes a pink ink with the peelings." ...
The umbrella that runs to the corner to get corners for the handkerchiefs stood up and said, "I am the umbrella that runs to the corner to get corners for the handkerchiefs."
...
"I am the umbrella that holds up the sky. I am the umbrella the rain comes through. I am the umbrella that tells the sky when to begin raining and when to stop raining.
"I am the umbrella that goes to pieces when the wind blows and then puts itself back together again when the wind goes down. I am the first umbrella, the last umbrella, the one and only umbrella all other umbrellas are named after, first, last and always."
When the stranger finished this speech telling who he was and where he came from, all the other umbrellas sat still for a little while, to be respectful.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one.
The secret to happiness is to admire without desiring.
I remember the Chillicothe ballplayers grappling the Long Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and the shoulders of the Rock Island players were a yellow smoke against the sundown. And the umpire's voice was hoarse calling balls and strikes and outs and the umpire's throat fought in the dust for a song.
Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
Our lives are like a candle in the wind.
I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way.
There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.
When a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along. The hard beginnings were forgotten and the struggles farther along. They became satisfied with themselves. Unity and common understanding there had been, enough to overcome rot and dissolution, enough to break through their obstacles. But the mockers came. And the deniers were heard. And vision and hope faded. And the custom of greeting became "What's the use?" And men whose forefathers would go anywhere, holding nothing impossible in the genius of man, joined the mockers and the deniers. They lost sight of what brought them along.
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.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man?
They are in tune and step
with constellations of universal law.
Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.
All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.
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.
One of the greatest necessities in America is to discover creative solitude.
The fog comes on little cat feet.
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.
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
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.
After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars
History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.