Allen Ginsberg Quotes

We're all golden sunflowers inside.

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

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

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

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.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.

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

You are what you think about all day.

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.

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.

The suffering itself is not so bad; it's the resentment against suffering that is the real pain.

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

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.

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.

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

The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

First thought, best thought.

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

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

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.

Candor disarms paranoia.

It's never to late to do nothing at all.

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.

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.

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

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

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.

Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

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.

There should be no distinction between what we write down, and what we really know.

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

I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone.

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

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health.

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

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

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

You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

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.