Authors Public Collections Topics My Collections

Quotes by Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

“Follow your inner moonlight; dont hide the madness.”

“It isnt enough for your heart to break because everybodys heart is broken now.”

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

“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; angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dyn”

“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.”

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

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

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. Its that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, thats what the poet does.”

“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. Thats what poetry does.”

“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather Boa!”

“I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... And think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries... Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, dont bother about sentences ...”

“In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”

“Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing.”

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”

“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.”

“America Im putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

“...who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,...”

“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 wasnt thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.”

“I heard Hard Rain and wept,”