Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

—Carl Sandburg

Life is an onion, and one peels it crying.

—French proverb

The girl held still and studied.
“Do you know…I know something?”
“Yes, what is it you know?”
“Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.”

—Carl Sandburg, “The People, Yes,” 1936

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came

Life would ring the bells of Ecstacy and

Forever be Itself again.

—Allen Ginsberg, “Graffiti 12th Cubicle Mens Room Syracuse Airport,”

in The Fall of America, 1972

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.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

“Poetry Considered,” in Atlantic Monthly, March 1923

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

“Prairie,” Cornhuskers, 1918

In these times you have to be an optimist to open your eyes when you wake in the morning.

New York Post, September 9, 1960

Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln never saw a movie, heard a radio or looked at television. They had “loneliness” and knew what to do with it. They were not afraid of being lonely because they knew that was when the creative mood in them would work.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

“Fog,” Chicago Poems, 1916