Beat Generation Quotes

#1. The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.

John Clellon Holmes

#2. I wished Dean and Carlo were there - then I realized they'd be out of place and unhappy. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining. The

Jack Kerouac

#3. ...unlike the Lost Generation, which was occupied with the loss of faith, the Beat Generation is becoming more and more occupied with the need for it.

John Clellon Holmes

#4. This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#5. I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys.

Harvey Pekar

#6. Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.

Garrett Hedlund

#7. John Clellon Holmes ... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'

Jack Kerouac

#8. Woe to those who spit on the beat generation, the wind will blow it back.

Bill Vaughan

#9. The Beat Generation - that term is even more familiar now, even more than say the '70s. Hype is built and established and people link it back to a certain generation, in this case the '40s and '50s. Now everyone knows that that group was the Beat Generation.

Garrett Hedlund

#10. The beat generation (coined in Playboy)

Jack Kerouac

#11. They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

Jack Kerouac

#12. Before they did all those shows on Jackson Pollock, I loved the way he formulated his paintings. I loved Basquiat - I was into the whole Beat generation, Kerouac, etc., and all those artists talked about that and Kerouac, so I just got in the middle of being spontaneous.

Matt Schulze

#13. Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.

William S. Burroughs

#14. The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on. *1958

Mort Sahl

#15. I realized Jack [Kerouac] was deeply committed to writing. Kesey was just as deeply committed to living and experiencing the lives of others; for him writing was just a part of living.

Sterling Lord

#16. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

Cormac McCarthy

#17. I believe in order, tenderness, and piety.

Jack Kerouac

#18. I CAN DO MAGIC! FEAR ME, LAWS OF PHYSICS, I'M COMING TO VIOLATE YOU!

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#19. If Im so brave, why do I feel like I might just ...
scream?

Maria Padian

#20. Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet?

Jack Kerouac

#21. I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.

Jack Kerouac

#22. I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth ...
without taxes

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#23. There are as many kinds of kisses as there are people on earth, as there are permutations and combinations of those people. No two people kiss alike - no two people fuck alike - but somehow the kiss is more personal, more individualized than the fuck.

Diane Di Prima

#24. We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

William Carlos Williams

#25. O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time ...

William S. Burroughs

#26. He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

Jack Kerouac

#27. Maybe I should stop while I'm ahead

Nay, I swim with sea-demons

no sweet summer tuned radio

over my sunless desertscape

how does it burn without the sun?

Moonshine Noire

#28. For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them.

John Clellon Holmes

#29. The purpose of war is to support your government's decisions by force.

Robert A. Heinlein

#30. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

Jack Kerouac

#31. Because every time someone finds a new animal, or a new amazing thing on earth, it means we haven't broken everything yet.

Maria Dahvana Headley

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

Allen Ginsberg

#33. They were brought up in these ruins and no longer notice them.

John Clellon Holmes

#34. My first record wasn't even with the Fugees. I was signed to Big Beat Records, so I was signed back in 1989 to the label that the Knocks are on now. You can always tell which generation had the pulse based on how they see things.

Wyclef Jean