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Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

Carl Sandburg

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Carl Sandburg
Age: 89 †
Born: 1878
Born: January 6
Died: 1967
Died: July 22
Biographer
Historian
Journalist
Musicologist
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Trade Unionist
Writer
Galesburg
Illinois
Carl August Sandburg
Living
Scripts
Journal
Away
Telling
Rainbow
Made
Sea
Barriers
Life
Air
Script
Rainbows
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Shoot
Unknowable
Poetry
Unknown
Phantom
Land
Wanting
Syllables
Animal
Search
Phantoms

More quotes by Carl Sandburg

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Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come.
Carl Sandburg
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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.
Carl Sandburg
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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.
Carl Sandburg
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Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the women don't get you then the whiskey must.
Carl Sandburg
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Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.
Carl Sandburg
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Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.
Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.
Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
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Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.
Carl Sandburg
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An expert is a damn fool a long way from home.
Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.
Carl Sandburg
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Tongues wrangled dark at a man. He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone. In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.
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The dead hold in their hands only what they have given away.
Carl Sandburg
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We had two grand antique professors who had been teaching at Lombard since before I was born.
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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.
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The greatest cunning is to have none at all.
Carl Sandburg
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Our lives are like a candle in the wind.
Carl Sandburg
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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.
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Arithmetic is where numbers fly like pigeons in and out of your head.
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Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'
Carl Sandburg