Quotes by Carl Sandburg
In zero weather I wore a turtleneck sweater, coat, and overcoat and read and wrote lighted by a lamp.
From year to year the chapel exercises, a half-hour beginning at nine, never lost interest for me.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
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.
Rouged was known as a fallen woman to the ministers, as a streetwalker to the police, as a chippy to the men on the hunt.
I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split the boulder.
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.
I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.
The basement had windows lighting the Old Man's workshop and plenty of room for the potatoes and cabbages we raised.
I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
In the crying-out-loud of that year, my two slight books made the same commotion as a child's whisper in a Kansas cyclone.
I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.
After the one-hour lecture came a two-hour free-for-all of speeches from the floor-anarchists, single taxers, radical socialists, Criers for cooperative stores, for war to be outlawed by international agreement.
I have always been respectful, even reverential, in a room where you can look a human skeleton in the eye-sockets.
We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
Basketball had a fascination for me, and during the four years I never thought of quitting the game.
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.
I have kept for years certain handwrought rusty nails that I can't throw away because of the way they say, we are of the time when man had tools but not yet machines for shaping us.
I never saw a fireman drunk on duty.
I wrote some editorials that I then considered instructive, solemn, and portentous, later seeing them as somewhat wishy-washy.
Enclosures are from my subterranean cavern of skulls, memoranda, miscellany, monkeybusiness.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
I had a flashlight thrown on how language can change over centuries.
In order to live, you have to eat, and having eaten, your sex drive sends you into begetting children, reproducing yourself.
