Allen Ginsberg Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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 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
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
I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.

Allen Ginsberg
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

Allen Ginsberg
This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven.

Allen Ginsberg
One must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one's own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others

Allen Ginsberg
I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

Allen Ginsberg
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

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
O mother
what have I left out
O mother
what have I forgotten

Allen Ginsberg
The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.

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

Allen Ginsberg
America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.

Allen Ginsberg
Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine
Jiggling yr knees blankeyed in the rain
When it snows in yr nose you catch cold in yr brain.

Allen Ginsberg
We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

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
My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use — my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

Allen Ginsberg
The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.

Allen Ginsberg
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

Allen Ginsberg
The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene

Allen Ginsberg
The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

Allen Ginsberg
A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.

Allen Ginsberg
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

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'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