Allen Ginsberg
Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.Collection: Letting Go
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 nightCollection: Dream
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.Collection: Giving Up
The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness.Collection: Language
Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.Collection: Poetry
Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.Collection: Important
The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.Collection: Doors
Everybody's serious but me.Collection: Serious
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Moving
[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.Collection: Going Out
Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.Collection: Weed
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.Collection: Thinking
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!Collection: Angel
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.Collection: Struggle
I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.Collection: Believe
America, why are your libraries full of tears?Collection: America
A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.Collection: Reality
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.Collection: War
Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]Collection: Secret
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.Collection: Art
First thoughts are the strongest.Collection: Firsts
I learned a world from each / one whom I lovedCollection: World
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 cellsCollection: Men
The suffering itself is not so bad; it’s the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.Collection: Real
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