Carl Sandburg Quotes

"One Parting

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, she went east,
And they both lived."

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.

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

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love letters.

Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

Man's life? A candle in the wind, hoar-frost on stone.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

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

HAPPINESS 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.

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