Ferlinghetti Quotes

#1. In the room, the cats eat mad spaghetti
Talking of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
--from "The Dream Song of J. Alfred Kerowack.

Richard Farina

#2. I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

Ric Ocasek

#3. Lawrence Ferlinghetti had a tremendous education as an artist and also an enormous knowledge of literarture.

David Amram

#4. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale
pg. 65// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#5. Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#6. I am going where turtles win
I am going
where conmen puke and die
Down the sad esplanades
of the official world.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#7. Blink at the sunned scratch
and stumble into silence
pg. 55// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#8. Telling over to myself/ how beauty never dies/ but lies apart/ among the aborigines/ of art/ and far above the battlefields/ of love
pg. 23// // A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#9. I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am
constantly shocking

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#10. Her eyes downcast all the while/ and singing to herself
pg. 18// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#11. I flew too near the sun
and my wax wings fell off
pg. 62// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#12. When I was a boy I was my father.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#13. When you're young, everything seems like a romance. At 96, I can still feel romantic about publishing young unknown writers.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#14. I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#15. As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#16. The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#17. It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#18. We have to raise the consciousness; the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#19. And the Blue Angels are coming back to scare the local population. I remember seeing old Vietnamese women ducking under the benches in Washington Square; they thought they were back in the war.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#20. I see a similarity
between dogs and me.
Dogs are the true observers
walking up and down the world
thru the Molloy country.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#21. Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#22. [in the true mad north] of introspection,
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die, glimpsing in their
dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#23. I think if there's a great depression there might be some hope.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#24. I have seen giraffes in junglejims
their necks like love
wound around the iron circumstances
of the world.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#25. Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#26. The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#27. I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#28. Freedom of speech is always under attack by Fascist mentality, which exists in all parts of the world, unfortunately.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#29. The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors; everything depends on the money.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#30. The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#31. Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#32. T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#33. If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#34. You and me could really exist
pg. 22// // A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#35. Is where I first/ fell in love/ with unreality
pg. 35// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#36. We were just a one-room bookstore; we didn't have any money for lawyers.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#37. 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

#38. Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#39. In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#40. I wish to descend in the social scale.
High society is low society.
I am a social climber
climbing downward
And the descent is difficult.
(- Junkman's Obbligato)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#41. Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#42. Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#43. For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#44. Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#45. I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#46. Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#47. Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#48. Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds ... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it ...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#49. I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#50. The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#51. Our government is a bird with two right wings ... They're devoted to the perpetuation & spread of corporate capitalism.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#52. They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#53. And balancing on eye beams/ above a sea of faces/ paces his way/ to the other side of day
pg. 30// // A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#54. A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#55. My country tears of thee.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#56. Invent a new language anyone can understand.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#57. The locust continues
to devour the world
Hunger persists
Love lurches on
listing to starboard
like a ship in a bottle
Human longing goes on
Loneliness a curse
Innocence persists
Ignorance persists

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#58. No, I didn't become disenchanted. I just couldn't paint like them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#59. Fuck Art, let's Dance!

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#60. Watching the world walk by
in its curious shoes
pg. 61// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#61. Souls dance undressed/ together/ and like loiterers/ on the fringes of a fair/ we ogle the unobtainable/ imagined mystery/ Yet away around on the far side/ like a stage door of a circus tent/ is a wide vent in the battlements/ where even elephants/ waltz thru
pg. 31// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#62. We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#63. I am waiting for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe for anarchy

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#64. Cast up
the heart flops over
gasping 'Love'
a foolish fish which tries to draw
its breath from flesh of air
And no one there to hear its death
among the sad bushes
where the world rushes by
in a blather of asphalt and delay

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#65. And heard the green birds singing/ from the other side of silence
pg. 36// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#66. It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#68. I too have drunk and seen
the spider

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#69. To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#70. Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#71. These are international criminals, and the spineless Democrats are doing nothing about it.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#72. I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#73. There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#74. Think long thoughts in short sentences.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#75. The poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#76. And I am waiting/ for Alice in Wonderland/ to retransmit to me/ her total dream of innocence
pg. 52// A Coney Island of the Mind

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#77. Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#78. Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#79. Make your mind learn its way around the heart.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#80. In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
'suffering humanity

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#81. Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#82. I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#83. Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#84. The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#85. If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti