Carl Sandburg Quotes
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Nearly all the best things that came to me in life have been unexpected, unplanned by me.
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Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
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Calling it off comes easy enough if you haven't told the girl you are smitten with her.
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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.
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Man's life? A candle in the wind, hoar-frost on stone.
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Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
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There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
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You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.
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I'm either going to be a writer or a bum.
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Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.
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Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.
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I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
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Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
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There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.
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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.
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Look out 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
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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.
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The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
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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.
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Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.