Lawrence Ferlinghetti Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
'suffering humanity

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The world is a beautiful place to be born into if you don't mind some people dying all the time or maybe only starving some of the time which isn't half so bad if it isn't you.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I once started out
to walk around the world
but ended up in Brooklyn,
that Bridge was too much for me.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I was the all-American boy, the Eagle Scout. I remember I was at my girlfriend's apartment, and there were these strange publications like The Nation and The New Republic. I started looking at them and thought, "Gee, this is weird; people saying things against America?" It was an awakening. On the East Coast, I'd never even heard of conscientious objectors.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I see another war is coming
but I won't be there to fight it.
I have read the writing
on the outhouse wall.
I helped Kilroy write it.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
See it was like this when we waltz into this place. A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-step And I says Dad let's cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really exist Wow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

Lawrence Ferlinghetti