Allen Ginsberg
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.Collection: Poetry
Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.Collection: Motivational
I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.Collection: Birthday
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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Poetry
I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.Collection: Poetry
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.
Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with 'The Idiot,' Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky's idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.
I was putting on a stiff upper lip and trying to fulfill the obligations I thought were demanded of me, taking over my father's role of taking care of my mother... and having to be the recipient of her confessions and emotions but of a delusional nature.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.
You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.
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.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.
Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians' breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.
None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Hurt
It's never to late to do nothing at all.Collection: Late
To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.Collection: Writing
Our heads are round so thought can change directionCollection: Learning
I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.Collection: Thinking
You are what you think about all day.Collection: Inspirational
Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?Collection: Sunflower
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.Collection: Writing
There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.Collection: Fiction
To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Fighting
I know too much and not enoughCollection: Too Much
The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.Collection: Pain
When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.Collection: Sacred
I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.Collection: Heart
I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.Collection: Decay
First thought, best thought.Collection: Crafts
What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?Collection: War
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.Collection: Art
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found - the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it.Collection: Doe
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?Collection: Angel
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!Collection: Dream
I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?Collection: Lonely