Explore Quotes by Carl Sandburg

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

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.

Here is the difference between Dante, Milton, and me. They wrote about hell and never saw the place. I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years.

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 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.

We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

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.

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

I have often wondered what it is an old building can do to you when you happen to know a little about things that went on long ago in that building.

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.

Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Where was I going? I puzzled and wondered about it til I actually enjoyed the puzzlement and wondering.

I fell in love, not deep, but I fell several times and then fell out.