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The dead hold in their hands only what they have given 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
Hold
Dead
Given
Away
Hands
Generosity

More quotes by Carl Sandburg

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The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.
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People lie because they don't remember clear what they saw. People lie because they can't help making a story better than it was the way it happened.
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Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
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There are dreams stronger than death. Men and women die holding these dreams.
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Faith is indispensable, and the world at times does not seem to have quite enough of it. It can and has accomplished what seems to be the impossible. Wars have been started and men and nations lost for the lack of it. Faith starts from the individual and builds men and nations. America was built by and on the faith of our ancestors.
Carl Sandburg
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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.
Carl Sandburg
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An ambition is a little creeper that creeps and creeps in your heart night and day, singing a little song, Come and find me, come and find me.
Carl Sandburg
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For we know when a nation goes down and never comes back, when a society or a civilization perishes, one condition may always be found. They forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what brought them along.
Carl Sandburg
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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.
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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.
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.
Carl Sandburg
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Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn child.
Carl Sandburg
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Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Carl Sandburg
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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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Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?
Carl Sandburg
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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.
Carl Sandburg
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The people know what the land knows.
Carl Sandburg
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Time is the coin of your life. You spend it. Do not allow others to spend it for you.
Carl Sandburg
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I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.
Carl Sandburg
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Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'
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