Allen Ginsberg Quotes

Steak swallowers zonked on Television!

Soul identical to each to each ... look in my eyes and speak to yourself, that makes me
everybody's lover

Significant timeless
reflex in sepulchre:
apparitions of immortality
consumed inward,
waiting openmouthed
in the fireless darkness.

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

I don't want to suffer any more, I have had my mind broken open over and over before, I have been isolate and loveless always. I have not slept with anyone since I saw you, not because I was faithful but because I am afraid and I know no one. I will always be afraid I will always be worthless, I will always be alone till I die and I will be tormented long after you leave me.

Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.

the day of the publication of the true literature of the American body will be day of Revolution
the revolution of the sexy lamb

Love is only a recognition of our own guilt and imperfection, and a supplication for forgiveness to the perfect beloved. This is why we love those who are more beautiful than ourselves, why we fear them, and why we must be unhappy lovers.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-
man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations!

It's time we did something to assert ourselves. After all, we do comprise 10% of the population.

Shit, Violence, bullets in the brain Unavailing.
We're in too deep to pull out.
Waiting for an orgasm, Mr. Baldwin?
Yes, waiting for an orgasm that's all.

Man is no form no mighty molecule no just
idea alone - all that Thing -
I feel man tender radiance at Heart between
breast and belly, that physical place
where the Self urges - delicate sensation

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.

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.

Ho threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality..

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

It means abandoning being a poet, abandoning your careerism, abandoning even the idea of writing any poetry, really abandoning, giving up as hopeless - abandoning the possibility of really expressing yourself to the nations of the world. Abandoning the idea of being a prophet with honor and dignity, and abandoning the glory of poetry and just settling down in the muck of your own mindYou really have to make a resolution to write for yourself, in the sense of not writing to impress yourself, but just writing what your self is saying.

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel
Covered with old gray for buzzing flies
Eye like mango flowing orange pus
Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep
Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta
Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats
Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts
Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys
Always pissing yellow Hooghly water
Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles
Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer
Nose smell a big gray Bidi
Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks
Covered with a hat of cloudy iron
Suffering water buffalo head lowered
To pull the huge cart of year uphill

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.

Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.

It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

You are a pot of gold, don't think I don' realize it.

What's sacred when the Thing is all the universe?
creeps to every soul like a vampire-organ singing behind
moonlit clouds -
poor being come squat
under bearded stars in a dark field in Peru
to drop my load - I'll die in horror that I die!
Not dams or pyramids but death, and we to prepare for that
nakedness, poor bones sucked dry by His long mouth
of ants and wind, & our souls murdered to prepare
His Perfection!
The moment's come, He's made His will revealed forever
and no flight into old Being further than the stars will not
find terminal in the same dark swaying port
of unbearable music
No refuge in Myself, which is on fire
or in the World which is His also to bomb & Devour!
Recognize His might! Loose hold
of my hands - my frightened skull
- for I had chose self-love -
my eyes, my nose, my face, my cock, my soul - and now
the faceless Destroyer!
A billion doors to the same new Being!
The universe turns inside out to devour me!
and the mighty burst of music comes from out the inhuman
door -

that blue flame burnning? Industry!

I want to see you. I feel more and more at with you now actually than ever before, I feel you more, actually more clarity, more confidence, more trust.

I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.

The electric network selling itself: The medium is the message

more diamonds and pearls of electricity

Hairy Mammal whaddya want

With dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls

All these books are published in Heaven.

Eat Eat said the sign

Every American wants MORE MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

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

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

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

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

You know, the guys there were so beautiful - they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!

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

First thought, best thought.

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.

There is a god
dying in America
already created
in the imagination of men
made palpable
for adoration:
there is an inner
anterior image
of divinity
beckoning me out
to pilgrimage

YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN

Happiness exists I feel it.
I cried for my soul, I cried for the world's soul.
The world has a beautiful soul.

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

Scream in despair over Meat and Metal Microphone

The Package is the Product, onomatopoeticized

How mercy gets to exist, where it comes from, perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem - an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe.

I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.

Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death! Money against Eternity! and eternity's strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion!

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.

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

I have no other possessions of value but my soul.

Oloch who entered my soul early. Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body. Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy. Moloch whom I abandon. Wake up in Moloch.. Light streaming out of the sky.
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! Skeleton treasuries! Blind capitals! Demonic industries! Spectral nations! Invincible madhouses! Granite cocks! Monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven.. Pavements, trees, radios, tons. Lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us.

I have just discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feelings.

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.

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!
The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand
and asshole holy!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!

A missle lost Unprogrammed

Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I float over the vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I dice and bury,
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.

One does not know yet whether Christ was
God or the Devil -
Buddha is more reassuring.

What prophecy actually is is not that you actually know that the bomb will fall in 1942. It's that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint - a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years.

I hadn't thought about what any army trains for. It merely maintains itself here for no exterior purpose.

How strange to remember anything, even a button
much less a universe.

'What creature gives birth to itself?'

The universe is mad, slightly mad.

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.

All Revolution and Consumption, Manufacture and Communication

We the People - shelling the Vietcong

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.

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.

O victory forget you're underwear we're free.

Candor disarms paranoia.

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?

Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit

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.

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

Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame

And he imagines cars
and rides them in his dreams,
so lonely growing up among
the imaginary automobiles
and dead souls of Tarrytown
to create
out of his own imagination
the beauty of his wild
forebears - a mythology
he cannot inherit.

a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon

What came is gone forever every time

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

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.

Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters
Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

Who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa

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

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.

We're stuck in our
Selves,
And who else to be stuck in?

- New York to San Fran

Now is the time of prophecy without death as a consequence
the universe will ultimately disappear
Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity
Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God
Yes Hollywood will get what it deserves
Time
Seepage of nerve-gas over the radio
History will make this poem prophetic and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music
I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy
Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract

Machine chaos on Earth, Too many bodies, mouths bleeding on every Continent

The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.

- an ant's dream's
funnier than
ours
- he has more of them
faster and seems
to give less of
a shit -

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.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known.

Anger falling asleep at the heart

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.

Inside skull vast as outside skull