Carl Sandburg

“I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.”

“Give me hunger,O you gods that sit and giveThe world its orders.Give me hunger, pain and want,Shut me out with shame and failureFrom 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 roomBreaking the long loneliness.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Someday they'll give a war and nobody will come.”

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

“So we all love a wild girl keeping a holdOn a dream she wants.”

“So time passed on. And the two skyscrapers decided to have a child. And they decided when their child came it should be a *free* child. "It must be a free child," they said to each other. "It must not be a child standing still all its life on a street corner. Yes, if we have a child she mist be free to run across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea. Yes, it must be a free child."So time passed on. Their child came. It was a railroad train, the Golden Spike Limited, the fastest long distance train in the Rootabaga Country. It ran across the prairie, to the mountains, to the sea.”

“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.”

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.”

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

“I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.”

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

“My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captivein the universe.”

“Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it runs by.”

“The single clenched fist lifted and ready,Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.Choose:For we meet by one or the other.”

“Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.”

“Now I am here - now read me - give me a name.”

“I am an idealist. I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”

“Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.”

“…Намерението е едно такова нещо, което те гризе отвътре и ти нашепва тихо "...ела и ме намери, ела и ме намери...”

“Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. They flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds.”

“Life is an onion - you peel it year by year and sometimes cry.”

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

“There is a music for lonely hearts nearly always. If the music dies down there is a silence. Almost the same as the movement of music. To know silence perfectly is to know music.”

“Time is the most valuable coin in your life. You and you alone will determine how that coin will be spent. Be careful that you do not let other people spend it for you.”

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

“The Lawyers Know Too Much THE LAWYERS, Bob, know too much.They are chums of the books of old John Marshall.They know it all, what a dead hand wrote,A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling,The bones of the fingers a thin white ash. The lawyers know a dead man’s thoughts too well. In the heels of the higgling lawyers, Bob,Too many slippery ifs and buts and howevers,Too much hereinbefore provided whereas,Too many doors to go in and out of. When the lawyers are throughWhat is there left, Bob?Can a mouse nibble at itAnd find enough to fasten a tooth in? Why is there always a secret singingWhen a lawyer cashes in?Why does a hearse horse snickerHauling a lawyer away?The work of a bricklayer goes to the blue.The knack of a mason outlasts a moon.The hands of a plasterer hold a room together.The land of a farmer wishes him back again. Singers of songs and dreamers of plays Build a house no wind blows over.The lawyers—tell me why a hearse horse snickers hauling a lawyer’s bones.”

“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.”

“Our lives are like a candle in the wind.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

“Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.”

“In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning”

“There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted”

“There are men and women so lonely they believe God, too, is lonely.”

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

“A baby is God's opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don't compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”

“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.”

“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”

“After the sunset on the prairie, there are only the stars”

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

“There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud”

“I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.”

“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.”

“The shovel is brother to the gun.”

“To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.”