Words matter. These are the best Allen Ginsberg Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I recommend for any basic course on the Beat Generation to familiarize yourself with ‘The Idiot,’ Prince Myshkin. He was Dostoyevsky’s idea of the most beautiful human being he could imagine, the creation of a saint in literature.
Black musicians were imitating speech cadences, and Kerouac was imitating the black musicians’ breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech. It always was speech rhythms or cadences as far as the ear that Kerouac was developing. All passed through black music.
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
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.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
I would say that Times Square was the central hangout for Burroughs, Kerouac, and myself from about 1945 to 1948.
I am 23, the year of the iron birthday, the gate of darkness. I am ill.
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
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.
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
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.
The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There’s this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.
America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.
Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.
I have been wrathful all my life, angry against my father and all others. My wrath must end. All my images now are of heaven.
You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.
America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
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.
