Quotes by Allen Ginsberg

America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes?

America this is quite serious

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.I read it every week.Always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s seriousbut me.

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

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

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

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

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

..Moloch 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.

You can own an elephant or a bank or power thereof but if theres no personal breast bliss all you own is a lot of dead atoms and ideas.

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

Follow your inner moonlight dont hide the madness.

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

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.

“Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.”

“one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others”

“I learned a world from each / one whom I loved”

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

“who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded and loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,”