Top 175 Quotes & Sayings by Allen Ginsberg - Page 2

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

What came is gone forever every time

You too must seek the sun.

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

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

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

Sanity - a trick of agreement

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

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

Scientist alone is true poet.

I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

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

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

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

Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health.

The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness.

War is good business Invest your son

Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.

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

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

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

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

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.

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 want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.

The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?

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.

Everybody's serious but me.

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 I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.

We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is.

First thoughts are the strongest.

There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.

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 don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.

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.

The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.

You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.

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.

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

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]

Others can measure their visions by what we see.

Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

What is obscenity? And to whom?

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

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

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