Allen Ginsberg Quotes - Page 5

I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly. God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'

If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

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

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.

You assume we are all sexually stable; while on the other hand, as I have become acquainted with people, I find that they are all perverted sinners, one way or another, that the whole society is corrupt and rotten and repressed and unconscious that it exhibits its repression in various forms of social sadism.

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.

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.

You can't escape the past in Paris, and yet what's so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn't seem to burden.

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.

To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing.

The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger's words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake's The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn't do it. In the end, I did it myself.

I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.

The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go.

The Jews always complained, kvetching about false gods, and erected the biggest false God, Jehovah, in middle of western civilization.

I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.

From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as "something NEW" and "like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen." But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.

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

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

The first person who really showed me the ugly spirit was Brion Gysin. "The ugly spirit shot Joan because . . ." and I never found out why. This Brion wrote out on a piece of paper in a sort of trance state.

Things are symbols of themselves.

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!