Allen Ginsberg Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.

Allen Ginsberg
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
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

Allen Ginsberg
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!

Allen Ginsberg
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
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Allen Ginsberg
The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around.

Allen Ginsberg
I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the HEavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war,

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

Allen Ginsberg
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
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination

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

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

Allen Ginsberg
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
None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Allen Ginsberg
What if someone gave a war & Nobody came?
Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.

Allen Ginsberg
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you
got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
Of Walt Whitman

Allen Ginsberg
Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.

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

Allen Ginsberg
America free Tom Mooney America save the Spanish Loyalists America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die America I am the Scottsboro boys.

Allen Ginsberg
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
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

Allen Ginsberg
Who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism

Allen Ginsberg
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows —/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.

Allen Ginsberg
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

Allen Ginsberg
Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.

Allen Ginsberg
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

Allen Ginsberg
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon,
woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset
shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze.

Allen Ginsberg
This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping.

Allen Ginsberg