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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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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
Syllables
Barriers
Shoot
Unknown
Search
Poet
Poetry
Unknowable

More quotes by Carl Sandburg

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The marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading Keep Off.
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What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?
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There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.
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Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.
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Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
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The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.
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Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.
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The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.
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I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.
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Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.
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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.
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There are people who want to be everywhere at once, and they get nowhere
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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.
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I learned you can't trust the judgment of good friends.
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Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.
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Men of ideas vanish when freedom vanishes.
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The greatest certainty in life is death. The greatest uncertainty is the time.
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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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Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.
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When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.
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