Zitat des Tages von Carl Sandburg:
Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
I wrote poems in my corner of the Brooks Street station. I sent them to two editors who rejected them right off. I read those letters of rejection years later and I agreed with those editors.
The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring.
Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
I took to wearing a black tie known as the Ascot, with long drooping ends. I had seen pictures of painters, sculptors, poets, wearing this style of tie.
Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.
My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.
I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.
I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.
To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then go to hell after all would be too damn hard.
There are 10 men in me and I do not know or understand one of them.
I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.
Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
Nothing happens unless first we dream.
Let a joy keep you. Reach out your hands and take it when it runs by.
I stayed away from mathematics not so much because I knew it would be hard work as because of the amount of time I knew it would take, hours spent in a field where I was not a natural.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.
We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.
To be a good loser is to learn how to win.
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.
The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
Let the gentle bush dig its root deep and spread upward to split one boulder.
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.
We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.
I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth.
I have always felt that a woman has the right to treat the subject of her age with ambiguity until, perhaps, she passes into the realm of over ninety. Then it is better she be candid with herself and with the world.
Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.
Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.