Hog butcher for the world, Tool maker, stacker of wheat, Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of big shoulders.
Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect.
I am an idealist. I believe in everything – I am only looking for proofs.
There is no song to your singing.
What else have I done nearly all my life than go hungry and go on singing?
A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.
Such a Big miracle in such a tiny baby. Big things often have small beginnings A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.
Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
The sea is always the same: and yet the sea always changes.
Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
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.
Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
We read Robert Browning’s poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.
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.
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.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky – or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
Yesterday is done. Tomorrow never comes. Today is here. If you don’t know what to do, sit still and listen. You may hear something. Nobody knows.
Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.
The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.