Carl Sandburg Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what was seen during a moment.

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.

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

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

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

Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.

By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.

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.

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

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.