Allen Ginsberg Quotes

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

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.

The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.

Scientist alone is true poet.

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.

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

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

You too must seek the sun.

War is good business Invest your son

The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness.

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 cells

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

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 learned a world from each / one whom I loved

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

I know too much and not enough

Night is the wonderful opportunity to take rest, to forgive, to smile, to get ready for all the battles that you have to fight tomorrow.

Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go.

Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.

What came is gone forever every time

First thoughts are the strongest.

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

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

Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.

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

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.

All these books are published in Heaven.

Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.

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.

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)

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.

Sanity - a trick of agreement

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

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.

The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid.

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

I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.

Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!

Everybody's serious but me.

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

Others can measure their visions by what we see.

What is obscenity? And to whom?

The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.

Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question "How does one become a prophet?"]

I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.

Subject is known by what she sees.

You can't photograph everything.