Literary Birthday – 6 January – Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg was born 6 January 1878 and died 22 July 1967.

Quotes

1. Nothing happens unless first we dream.
2. 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.
3. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
4. Life is like an onion; you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
5. Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.
6. Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
7. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.
8. Love your neighbour as yourself; but don’t take down the fence.
9. All my life I have been trying to learn, to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel and after the five years, lacking a month, I took to finish it, I was still travelling, still a seeker.
10. In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you awake in the morning.

Carl Sandburg was an American writer and editor best known for poetry. He won three Pulitzer Prizes. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History for Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & the War Years, and Chicago Poems was his first published book of verse. Honey and Salt celebrates the themes that engaged him as a poet for more than half a century of writing- life, love, and death.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson

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