Allen Ginsberg citations

Page 2

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

“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?”