Carl Sandburg Quotes

There is a formal poetry perfect only in form…the number of syllables, the designated and required stresses of accent, the rhymes if wanted-they come off with the skill of a solved crossword puzzle.

The more rhyme there is in poetry the more danger of its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

In the spacious highways of books major or minor, each poet is allowed the stride that will get him where he wants to go if, God help him, he can hit that stride and keep it.

The simple dignity of a child drinking a bowl of milk embodies the fascination of an ancient rite.

A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.

I am still studying verbs and the mystery of how they connect nouns. I am more suspicious of adjectives than at any other time in all my born days.

The people know what the land knows.

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

or we may hold them in respect and affection as fellow creepers on a commodious planet saying, ‘Yes you too you too are people’.

‘Would you just as soon get off the earth?’ holding ourselves aloof in pride of distinction saying to ourselves this costs us nothing as though hate has no cost as though hate ever grew anything worth growing.

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

The people will live on. The learning and blundering will live on. They will be tricked and sold and again sold And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds.

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

Look how you use proud words, When you let proud words go, it is not easy to call them back, They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can’t hear you calling-look out how you use proud words.

Why is there always a secret singing When a lawyer cashes in? Why does a hearse horse snicker Hauling a lawyer away?

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all.

When Abraham Lincoln was shovelled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin… in the dust, in the cool tombs.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.) I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: ‘Omaha’.