Quotes & Sayings About Ginsberg

Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"] — Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university. — Patti Smith

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt - industrial - modern - all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos - all these
entangled in your mummied roots - and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form! — Allen Ginsberg

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

Names?' the receptionist asked us.
"Jesus," Jamie answered.
"Mary," said Stella.
"Satan," I said as I walked past her and pushed open the door to Ira Ginsberg's office. — Michelle Hodkin

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

Happiness exists I feel it.
I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul.
The world has a beautiful soul. — Allen Ginsberg

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

Empire State's orange shoulders lifted above the Hell — Allen Ginsberg

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes? — Allen Ginsberg

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

There is no cowardice in removing yourself from a wildly unhealthy and unwinnable situation . . . You shouldn't feel like you have to play . . . you don't owe anyone anything. You don't have to be available to everyone. You can stop. — Scaachi Koul

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

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters
Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever! — Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. — Allen Ginsberg

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel! — Allen Ginsberg

But Allison always finished what she started. It was both a saving grace and a tragic flaw. — Debra 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

That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this "entity," as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit. — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is. — Allen Ginsberg

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

All these books are published in Heaven. — Allen Ginsberg

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. — Allen Ginsberg

I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste? — J. D. McClatchy

Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn't like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton. — Jay Leno

Unless Chase Bank quits I prophesy blood violence — Allen Ginsberg

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. — Allen Ginsberg

Man is no form no mighty molecule no just
idea alone - all that Thing -
I feel man tender radiance at Heart between
breast and belly, that physical place
where the Self urges - delicate sensation — Allen Ginsberg

First thoughts are the strongest. — Allen Ginsberg

What happened, man? Gerry and Ginsberg are cold, and dead, in the ground. Kesey's stoned, and out of town. We've come to the end of the brotherhood song. The children brandish knives upon each other's throats, and their loaded 45's sit snug in lunch boxes nestled safely between Oreo cookies and a ham sandwich. Where are you now, oh ancient hipsters? Raggedy Beats beat down and broken wheel raggedy wheelchairs down ghostly geriatric wards. Where are you now, oh day-glow dreamers? Have you gotten off the bus and into your Mercedes? Did you get that second mortgage, and bear your fattened little babies? Where is that girl with flowers in her hair? Where is the man with revolution in his veins? We ask ourselves "where did we go wrong?" But there is no we. There is you, and then there is I. You do what you need to survive, And I do what I must to stay alive. We stand here Bleeding, slicing each other's wrists With the icy ridges of hardened jagged hearts, Cassandra's — Bearl Brooks

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination — Allen Ginsberg

He threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it — Allen Ginsberg

If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction — Allen Ginsberg

Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie. — Allen Ginsberg

I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous. — Thom Mayne

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

My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing. — Anne Waldman

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

There is something about the aroma of fresh books that's totally intoxicating. A new book has a certain clean, crisp smell full of promise that is difficult to define. Sort of like the scent and feeling of just-washed bed linens at the moment you slide your legs between them. — Debra Ginsberg

Trees scream and drop bright leaves — Allen Ginsberg

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

I'm too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I'd be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan "a genius." My science teacher told me that television was "the new opiate of the masses" and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett. — Simon Rich

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

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

Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go ... — Allen Ginsberg

What Patriot wrote that shit? — 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

Eat Meat and your a beast — 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

Being burned out is a lot better than having no fire in the fist place. — Scott 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

[Allen] Ginsberg totally helped that out. He was the best sales person. He was the most pop. They are still shocking and relevant, especially [William] Burroughs. — Yony Leyser

..I'm not sorry (America) — Allen Ginsberg

Never apologize for saying what/how you feel. Cuz' that's like saying, "Sorry for being real". — Scott Ginsberg

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at. — David Bowie

...my man world will blow up — Allen Ginsberg

O victory forget you're underwear we're free. — Allen Ginsberg

that blue flame burnning? Industry! — Allen Ginsberg

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

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

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady. — Thom Gunn

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

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

If my opinion runs more than twenty pages," she said, "I am disturbed that I couldn't do it shorter." The mantra in her chambers is "Get it right and keep it tight." She disdains legal Latin, and demands extra clarity in an opinion's opening lines, which she hopes the public will understand. "If you can say it in plain English, you should," RBG says. Going through "innumerable drafts," the goal is to write an opinion where no sentence should need to be read twice. "I think that law should be a literary profession," RBG says, "and the best legal practitioners regard law as an art as well as a craft. — Irin Carmon

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

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last. — Leslie Fiedler

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

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa! — Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics. — David Amram

First word ... best word. — 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

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

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded. — Allen Ginsberg

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America. — Allen Ginsberg

Don't you see that I cannot be composed, I cannot reconcile myself, because there is no other reality but loneliness for me and before I am dragged back into isolation I will clasp and grasp and claw in fright even at you without consciousness - even I - and I am afraid that I cannot survive if I have to go on into myself. — Allen Ginsberg

Anger falling asleep at the heart — Allen Ginsberg

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God! — Allen Ginsberg

Trees hang their branches — Allen Ginsberg

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 — Allen Ginsberg

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven! — Allen Ginsberg

We the People - shelling the Vietcong — 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

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 — Allen Ginsberg

When Violence floods the State from above, flowery land razed for robot proliferation — 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

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

...salute the new sunset — 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

Focus isn't about hammering one nail all our lives.
It's about hammering lots of nails, one way, all our lives. — Scott Ginsberg

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

It's tough to make funny films. And the truth is, with this process, especially if you write your own movie, then you're giving three years of your life to it. And so, I just have to be sure that when I embark on it that I'm happy to think that in three years' time I'm going to be sitting in a room on the tenth floor of an odd office building at Ginsberg Libby talking about it. So I'm keen not to jump into it too quickly and just make sure it's something that I really want. — Dan Mazer

Now the Great Fear's rolled round the world and washes over Newspaper Grey air — Allen Ginsberg

more diamonds and pearls of electricity — Allen Ginsberg

Candor disarms paranoia. — 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

But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take. — John Clellon Holmes