Allen Ginsberg Quotations | Page 2

War is good business Invest your son

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.

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

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

First thoughts are the strongest.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

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

...the bewildering beauty of Paris...

Scientist alone is true poet.

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.

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

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

All these books are published in Heaven.

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.

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

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

You too must seek the sun...

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

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

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.

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Be careful, you are not in Wonderland. I've heard the strange madness long growing in your soul. But you are fortunate in your ignorance, in your isolation. You who have suffered, find where love hides. Give, share, lose—lest we die, unbloomed.

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

First thought, best thought.

Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health.

Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.

I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence.

You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.

Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

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.

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.

There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.

Candor disarms paranoia.

The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred

The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal... That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing... The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won't show people. To write secretly... so you can actually be free to say anything you want.

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

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

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

It's never to late to do nothing at all.

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

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.

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.

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

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

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

You are what you think about all day.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

Every American wants MORE & MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more & more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

I believe that we are put here in human form to decipher the hieroglyphs of love and suffering. And, there is no degree of love or intensity of feeling that does not bring with it the possibility of a crippling hurt. But, it is a duty to take that risk and love without reserve or defense.

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.