Allen Ginsberg Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-
conscious looking at the full moon.

Allen Ginsberg
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

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

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

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

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
Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

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
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
Downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph.

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

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