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Leaves of Grass quotes
10 quotes from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #1322 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart!
32 I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.
1 I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
30 All truths wait in all things, They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it, They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon, The insignificant is as big to me as any, (What is less or more than a touch?)
Stranger, if you passing meet me and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little, Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved, Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love, If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
Good-bye my fancy--(I had a word to say, But ’tis not quite the time--The best of any man’s word or say, Is when its proper place arrives--and for its meaning, I keep mine till the last.)