Allen Ginsberg Quotes & Sayings

Shit, Violence, bullets in the brain Unavailing.
We're in too deep to pull out.
Waiting for an orgasm, Mr. Baldwin?
Yes, waiting for an orgasm that's all. — Allen Ginsberg

LSD Shakti-snake settles like Gas into Consciousness — Allen Ginsberg

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood? — 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

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull ... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts. — Allen Ginsberg

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

Who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish. — Allen Ginsberg

Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse. — Allen Ginsberg

There is a god
dying in America
already created
in the imagination of men
made palpable
for adoration:
there is an inner
anterior image
of divinity
beckoning me out
to pilgrimage — Allen Ginsberg

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

senseless, senseless coughs of emotion — Allen Ginsberg

who sought heaven
under a mountain of stone,
sat thinking
till he realized
the land of blessedness exists
in the imagination - — Allen Ginsberg

May no Evil Eye peek thru window, keyhole or gunsight at his white haired face! — Allen Ginsberg

Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on. — Allen Ginsberg

The weight of the world is love.
Under the burden of solitude,
under the burden of dissatisfaction
the weight,the weight we carry is love. — Allen Ginsberg

The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself. — Allen Ginsberg

With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls — Allen Ginsberg

Oloch who entered my soul early. Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body. Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy. Moloch whom I abandon. Wake up in Moloch.. Light streaming out of the sky.
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries! Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations! Invincible madhouses! Granite cocks! Monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven.. Pavements, trees, radios, tons. Lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us. — Allen Ginsberg

I shudder, I see the love, I'm doomed, my heart melts again - can't stand not to be in love, can't stand not to be melting with real tenderness, childlike need sweetnesses, that's what's wrong with me. — Allen Ginsberg

It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again. — 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

One does not know yet whether Christ was
God or the Devil -
Buddha is more reassuring. — Allen Ginsberg

No more to say, and nothing to weep for — Allen Ginsberg

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

You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you. — Allen Ginsberg

An unnoticed corner of the world suddenly becomes noticed, and when you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it becomes sacred. (On Robert Frank's photography) — Allen Ginsberg

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.' — Allen Ginsberg

When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred. — Allen Ginsberg

No point writing when the spirit doth not lead. — Allen Ginsberg

Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe — Allen Ginsberg

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel
Covered with old gray for buzzing flies
Eye like mango flowing orange pus
Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep
Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta
Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats
Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts
Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys
Always pissing yellow Hooghly water
Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles
Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer
Nose smell a big gray Bidi
Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks
Covered with a hat of cloudy iron
Suffering water buffalo head lowered
To pull the huge cart of year uphill — Allen Ginsberg

All these books are published in Heaven. — Allen Ginsberg

The electric network selling itself: The medium is the message — Allen Ginsberg

Washing terror-waves round earth-globe back to suburb TV home night kitchens — Allen Ginsberg

Forget pleasure and Ambition — Allen Ginsberg

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions. — Allen Ginsberg

Our means in America to control the money munching war machine, bright lit industry — Allen Ginsberg

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

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks ... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each. — Allen Ginsberg

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. — Allen Ginsberg

This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known. — Allen Ginsberg

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded. — 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

With my fucking suave manners and knowitall, eyes, and mind full of fantasy - the Me! that horror that keeps me conscious, in this Hell of Birth & Death — Allen Ginsberg

Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms. — Allen Ginsberg

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

Scientist alone is true poet. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — 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

How mercy gets to exist, where it comes from, perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem - an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe. — Allen Ginsberg

What is obscenity? And to whom? — 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

War is good business Invest your son — Allen Ginsberg

America will be refused eternity by her own mad son the bomb! — Allen Ginsberg

The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid. — Allen Ginsberg

Eat Eat said the sign — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest, to forgive, to smile, to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow. — Allen Ginsberg

[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know. — Allen Ginsberg

I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.
God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly. — Allen Ginsberg

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed. — Allen Ginsberg

I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do. — Allen Ginsberg

Who can prophesy peace, or vow Futurity for any but armed insects — Allen Ginsberg

It's time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population. — Allen Ginsberg

I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric. — Allen Ginsberg

To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing. — Allen Ginsberg

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

...salute the new sunset — Allen Ginsberg

First thought, best thought. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — 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

I am miserable now - not feeling unhappiness, just lack of life coming to me and coming out of me - resignation to getting nothing and seeking nothing, staying behind shell. The glare of unknown love, human, unhad by me, - the tenderness I never had. I don't want to be just a nothing, a sick blank, withdrawal into myself forever. I just want something, beside the emptiness I've carried around in me all my life. — Allen Ginsberg

Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night — Allen Ginsberg

that blue flame burnning? Industry! — Allen Ginsberg

We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — Allen Ginsberg

What came is gone forever every time — Allen Ginsberg

And the Children of the Warmakers're exempt from fighting their parents' war — Allen Ginsberg

Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go
Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A million girls vomit and groan
Millions of families hopeless alone — Allen Ginsberg

The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because ... " and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — Allen Ginsberg

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 night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz — Allen Ginsberg

I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people. — Allen Ginsberg

Others can measure their visions by what we see. — 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

I feel my life is sterile, I am unbloomed, unused, I have nothing I can have that I will ever want, only some love, only dearness and tenderness, to make me weep. I am moved now and sad and unhappy beyond cold unhappiness, beyond any inconvenience that will cause you by my affection. — Allen Ginsberg

No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm. — Allen Ginsberg

Hairy Mammal whaddya want — Allen Ginsberg

The Package is the Product, onomatopoeticized — Allen Ginsberg

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

Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute. — Allen Ginsberg

You too must seek the sun... — Allen Ginsberg

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved — Allen Ginsberg

Ho threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.. — Allen Ginsberg