Allen Ginsberg Quotes

#1. With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls

Allen Ginsberg

#2. Brainwash cried Romney, the Governor of Pollution

Allen Ginsberg

#3. The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

Allen Ginsberg

#4. ...my man world will blow up

Allen Ginsberg

#5. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#6. O victory forget you're underwear we're free.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#9. enraptured in hypnotic war

Allen Ginsberg

#10. I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.

Allen Ginsberg

#11. Electric Networks spread fear of murder on the streets

Allen Ginsberg

#12. Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#14. Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A million girls vomit and groan
Millions of families hopeless alone

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#16. America this is quite serious

Allen Ginsberg

#17. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#18. The madman bum and angel beat in time with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years

Allen Ginsberg

#19. May no Evil Eye peek thru window, keyhole or gunsight at his white haired face!

Allen Ginsberg

#20. Everybody's serious but me.

Allen Ginsberg

#21. senseless, senseless coughs of emotion

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#23. Our heads are round so thought can change direction

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#26. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#27. What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint - a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.

Allen Ginsberg

#28. I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#30. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#31. ..I'm not sorry (America)

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#33. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#34. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#35. Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.

Allen Ginsberg

#36. Whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,

Allen Ginsberg

#37. Unless Chase Bank quits I prophesy blood violence

Allen Ginsberg

#38. An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography)

Allen Ginsberg

#39. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#40. Mothers weep and Sons be dumb
your brothers and children murder the beautiful yellow bodies of Indochina in dreams invented for your eyes by TV

Allen Ginsberg

#41. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#42. They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!

Allen Ginsberg

#43. The actual materials are important ... A book at the nightstand is important-a light you can get at-or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

Allen Ginsberg

#44. All these books are published in Heaven.

Allen Ginsberg

#45. If we don't show anyone, we're free to write anything.

Allen Ginsberg

#46. The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid.

Allen Ginsberg

#47. He saw that I was shy, and at the time I was still scared of feeling with another person, so he put his arm around me and pulled me and put my head on his breast and gave me love actually.

Allen Ginsberg

#48. Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.

Allen Ginsberg

#49. First thoughts are the strongest.

Allen Ginsberg

#50. We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.

Allen Ginsberg

#51. What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

Allen Ginsberg

#52. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#54. You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if there's no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

Allen Ginsberg

#55. Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell

Allen Ginsberg

#56. Banks burn, boys die bullet-eyed, mothers scream realization the vast tonnage of napalm

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#58. ... who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, ...

Allen Ginsberg

#59. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

#60. Death which is the mother of the universe! - Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage sealed behind the sky - no revolution might destroy that maidenhood

Allen Ginsberg

#61. That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.

Allen Ginsberg

#62. Others can measure their visions by what we see.

Allen Ginsberg

#63. No point writing when the spirit doth not lead.

Allen Ginsberg

#64. First thought, best thought.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#66. America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb

Allen Ginsberg

#67. The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because ... " and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state.

Allen Ginsberg

#68. There's a guy, Anatole Broyard, of the N. Y. Times Book Review, who's still chasing Kerouac's corpse with a stiletto.

Allen Ginsberg

#69. Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.

Allen Ginsberg

#70. I have no other possessions of value but my soul.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#72. Earth pollution identical with Mind pollution, consciousness Pollution identical with filthy sky

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#74. Be careful, you are not in Wonderland. I've heard the strange madness long growing in your soul. But you are fortunate in your ignorance, in your isolation. You who have suffered, find where love hides. Give, share, lose - lest we die, unbloomed.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#76. 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.

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#78. 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?

Allen Ginsberg

#79. I shudder, I see the love, I'm doomed, my heart melts again - can't stand not to be in love, can't stand not to be melting with real tenderness, childlike need sweetnesses, that's what's wrong with me.

Allen Ginsberg

#80. My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use
my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

Allen Ginsberg

#81. You can't photograph everything.

Allen Ginsberg

#82. Sanity - a trick of agreement

Allen Ginsberg

#83. You know, the guys there were so beautiful - they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.

Allen Ginsberg

#84. Trees scream and drop bright leaves

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#86. Slaves of Plastic! Leather-shoe chino-pants prisoners! Haircut junkies! Dacron-shiffers!

Allen Ginsberg

#87. 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

Allen Ginsberg

#88. Who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music, who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts

Allen Ginsberg

#89. America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?

Allen Ginsberg

#90. LSD Shakti-snake settles like Gas into Consciousness

Allen Ginsberg

#91. Who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism

Allen Ginsberg

#92. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

Allen Ginsberg

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

Allen Ginsberg

#94. Who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa

Allen Ginsberg

#95. The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Allen Ginsberg

#96. Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish.

Allen Ginsberg

#97. Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.

Allen Ginsberg

#98. Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?

Allen Ginsberg

#99. Thus, as the Buddha said to a lady who offered him a curse,the gift is returned to the giver when it is not accepted

Allen Ginsberg

#100. War is good business Invest your son

Allen Ginsberg