Allen Ginsberg
Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.Collection: Cells
When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.Collection: Snow
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.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Flower
It's time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population.Collection: Population
If you want to make order, put your own heart in order, and, having put one's heart in order, one can regulate the family order.Collection: Heart
You can't photograph everything.Collection: Photograph
Presumably, if you see spirit at the moment it gained access, then it'll be dropped.Collection: Spirit
I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.Collection: Moon
I like the image of The Old Man and the Sea, of striving and succeeding but finding that the success was ghost success. In other words, in the long run, after a certain age, the motives for success, pride or oppressing people or getting power.Collection: Running
what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imaginationCollection: Skulls
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.Collection: Horse
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.Collection: Talking
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.Collection: Sorry
I've got enough money to live where I want, but I don't want to move.Go out and have sexual adventures in Burma.Collection: Moving
All these books are published in Heaven.Collection: Book
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 shameCollection: Intelligent
Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.Collection: Life
Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!Collection: Thank God
My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.Collection: Book
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?Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Evil
Inside skull vast as outside skullCollection: Skulls
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.Collection: Practice
The apparition of an evil, sick unconscious wild city rose before me in visible semblance, and about the dead buildings in the barren air, the bodies of the soul that built the wonderland shuffled and stalked and stalked and lurched in attitudes of immemorial nightmare all around.Collection: Attitude
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!Collection: Old Things
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.Collection: Book
Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.Collection: Years
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)Collection: Photography
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?Collection: Baby
…we’re all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment (Sunflower Sutra)Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Rain
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.Collection: Other Worlds
They [Nicaragua] haven't had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?Collection: War
Subject is known by what she sees.Collection: Vision
What is obscenity? And to whom?Collection: Obscenity
Scientist alone is true poet.Collection: Poet
I 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 the night.Collection: Hipster
Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.Collection: Records
I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.Collection: Dream
It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.Collection: Broken Heart
I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone.Collection: Flower
The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.Collection: Depression
Others can measure their visions by what we see.Collection: Vision
Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Art
War is good business Invest your sonCollection: War
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.Collection: Differences