Allen Ginsberg Quotes

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”

“I know too much and not enough”

“We're all golden sunflowers inside.”

“Not even the human
imagination satisfies
the endless emptiness of the soul.”

“Whoever controls the media, the
images, controls the culture.”

“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.”

“No rest
without love,
No sleep
without dreams
of love -
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines
the final wish
is love.”

“No rest without love,
no sleep without dreams of love-
be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines,
the final wish is love
-cannot be bitter, cannot deny,
cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy”

“He saw that I was shy, and at the time I was still scared of feeling with another person, so he put his arm around me and pulled me and put my head on his breast and gave me love actually.”

“Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”

“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.”

“I learned a world from each / one whom I loved”

“I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the Haavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war, That is, I could, make sense, invoke politics and try organize a union of opinion about what to do to Cuba, China, Russia, Bolivia, New Jersey, etc. However since in America the folks are convinced their heaven is all right, those manifestos make no dent except in giving authority & courage to the small band of hipsters who are disaffected like gentle socialists. Meanwhile the masses the proletariat the people are smug and the source of the great Wrong. So the means then is to communicate to the grand majority- and say I or anybody did write a balanced documented account not only of the lives of America but the basic theoretical split from the human body as Reich has done- But the people are so entrenched in their present livelihood that all the facts in the world-such as that China will be 1/4 of world pop makes no impression at all as a national political fact that intelligent people can take counsel on and deal with humorously & with magnificence. So that my task as a politician is to dynamite the emotional rockbed of inertia and spiritual deadness that hangs over the cities and makes everybody unconsciously afraid of the cops- To enter the Soul on a personal level and shake the emotion with the Image of some giant reality-of any kind however irrelevant to transient political issue- to touch & wake the soul again- That soul which is asleep or hidden in armor or unable to manifest itself as free life of God on earth- To remind by chord of deep groan of the Unknown to most Soul- then further politics will take place when people seize power over their universe and end the long dependence on an external authority or rhetorical set sociable emotions-so fixed they don't admit basic personal life changes-like not being afraid of jails and penury, while wandering thru gardens in high civilization.”

“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.”

“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”

“A naked lunch is natural to us
We eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness.”

“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.”

“I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.”

“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.”

“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!”

“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”

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

“Another lover hits the universe. The circle is broken. But with death comes rebirth. And like all lovers and sad people, I am a poet.”

“I smoke marijuana every chance I get.”

“Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!”

“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”

“It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.”

“Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.”

“America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.”

“Everybody's serious but me.”

“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?”

“what sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination”

“To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.”

“My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.”

“To gain your own voice you have to forget about having it heard.”

“America, why are your libraries full of tears?”

“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”

“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”

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

“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.”

“What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?”

“Who can live with this Consciousness and not wake frightened at sunrise?”

“The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.”

“Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”

“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.”

“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.”

“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.”

“Sanity - a trick of agreement”

“All these books are published in Heaven.”

“The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene”

“I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly.
God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.”

“You too must seek the sun…”

“I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”

“The universe is mad, slightly mad.”

“he threw up his hands
and wrote the Universe dont exist
and died to prove it”

“The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!”

“I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“Scientist alone is true poet.”

“The war is language,
language abused
for Advertisement,
language used
like magic for power on the planet.”

“Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose.”

“America, Sacco & Vanzetti must not die.”

“You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.”