Allen Ginsberg Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

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

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
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
Who'll come lie down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who'll look into my hooded eye Who'll lie down under my darkened thigh?

Allen Ginsberg
Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.

Allen Ginsberg
Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame

Allen Ginsberg
It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

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

Allen Ginsberg
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca what were you doing down by the watermelons?

Allen Ginsberg
It all begins with fucking around and intuition and without any idea of what you're doing.

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

Allen Ginsberg
Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts Wet processions Families walk Stunted boys big heads don't talk Look bony skulls & silent round eyes Starving black angels in human disguise.

Allen Ginsberg
1. You can't win.
2. You can't break even.
3. You can't even get out of the game.

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

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