Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Allen Ginsberg

You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.

I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature.

Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.

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

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.

I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.

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

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

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.

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.

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

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

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.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found - the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.

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

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

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.

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

we're all golden sunflowers inside.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest, to forgive, to smile, to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

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

Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.

I know too much and not enough

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

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.

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

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.

First thought, best thought.

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

I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light. Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light. Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light.

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

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

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

It's never to late to do nothing at all.

You are what you think about all day.

Every American wants MORE & MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more & more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

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

Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go.

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

Candor disarms paranoia.