Allen Ginsberg Quotes

I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense.

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.

When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.

You are what you think about all day.

We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line.

It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others

The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny, cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

Candor disarms paranoia.

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone.

I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.

What if somebody gave a war andNobody came?Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy andForever be Itself again.

I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.

Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches.

But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.

You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction

So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.

The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.

Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene

War is good business Invest your son

When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America.