Carl Sandburg Quotes

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.

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

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.

Man is born with rainbows in his heart and you'll never read him unless you consider rainbows.

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

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

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.

"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 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.

The greatest cunning is to have none at all.

The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.

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

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

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

The United States is, not are. The Civil War was fought over a verb. Orval Faubus don't know that. But he gonna know, he gonna know.