Allen Ginsberg Quotes - Page 3

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

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.

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night

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.

What is obscenity? And to whom?

I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.

Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash.

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

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

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.

The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.

So the problem for the poetic artist or the photographer is the common problem of continuous attentiveness, continuous attempts to notice what he is noticing, continuous alertness to catch himself thinking or seeing, devotional attentiveness to the world he's moving through.

Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.

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

Everybody's serious but me.

[William Butler] Yeats has the phrase Hodos Chameliontos, chameleon-like, in that you don't know where the beginning or the middle or the end is, so it's an unrelieved hallucination, because you don't know where you're coming in and you don't know where you're going out. It ends, you're going into the hallucination, or maybe coming out of it, I don't know.

I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made.

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

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

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

Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.

I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

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.

First thoughts are the strongest.