Thursday, March 15, 2012

Quotes from Carl Sandburg

I came across these quotes while looking through some old college notebooks. Sandburg had a way turning a phrase that is at the same time both absurd and astute.

"The man who knows everything has fleas in each ear and they look up the answers."
-- from Sandburg's Fables, Foibles, and Foobles


"What is shame? Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are...."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"Truth consists of paradoxes and a paradox is two facts that stand on opposite hilltops and across the intervening valley call each other liars."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"A celebrity is a fellow who eats celery with celerity."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"Fame is a figment of a pigment. It comes and goes. It changes with every generation. There never were two fames alike. One fame is precious and luminous; another is a bubble of a bauble."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg


"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."
-- from Harry Golden's Carl Sandburg