Quotes About The Beat Generation

#1. The beat generation (coined in Playboy)

Jack Kerouac

#2. 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

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

Bill Vaughan

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

Harvey Pekar

#5. 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

#6. ...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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Everywhere you walk, every place you go is full of art, explicit or hidden! If you can see them, you will be the richest art collector and your memory will be the richest art gallery!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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

Jack Kerouac

#15. 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

#16. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and be able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water.

J.R.R. Tolkien

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

Jack Kerouac

#18. 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

#19. I would only spend a week or two in the Philippines, most probably the week during my birthday because I am planning to give away Christmas gifts to the poor people of General Santos just like what I did last year.

Manny Pacquiao

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

Jack Kerouac

#21. 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

#22. I worked at McDonald's. I cooked. It was one of the toughest jobs I've ever had. These people earn every single penny they get. In fact, they earn way more than they get.

Keith Ellison

#23. Please Mia, don't make me write a song ... - Adam Wilde, If I Stay

Gayle Forman

#24. Most countries choose to have government run the economy.

Marco Rubio

#25. When he heard there was nothing to eat, he sat down and wept ... "Why did I ever wake up!" he cried.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#26. 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

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

John Clellon Holmes

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

Allen Ginsberg

#29. 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

#30. What dogs? These are my children, little people with fur who make my heart open a little wider.

Oprah Winfrey

#31. 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

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

John Clellon Holmes

#33. 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

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

William S. Burroughs

#35. Kids know when they're getting yelled at and mocked, I can assure you.

Mallory Ortberg

#36. Perfect the Will, the Mind, Feeling, their corporeal organs and their material tools; be useful to yourselves, to your own ones, and to others; and Happiness, insofar as it exists on this earth, will come of itself

Boleslaw Prus

#37. That's the kind of ad I like, facts, facts, facts.

Samuel Goldwyn

#38. At the time, the United States had an attorney general named John Ashcroft, who had stated that America had "no king but Jesus" (a claim that was exactly two words too long).

Christopher Hitchens

#39. Through the sacred art of pausing, we develop the capacity to stop hiding, to stop running away from our experience. We begin to trust in our natural intelligence, in our naturally wise heart, in our capacity to open to whatever arises.

Tara Brach

#40. 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

#41. 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

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

William S. Burroughs