Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

gran parte de nuestra conciencia está llena de lenguaje, como una especie de murmulleo detrás de la oreja, un continuo blablablá que en realidad nos impide respirar hacia lo más hondo y sentir con más sutileza y dulzura los sentimientos que realmente albergamos como personas, los unos por los otros, más que como máquinas parlantes.

I am not all now but a universe of skin and breath & changing thought and burning hand & softened heart in the old bed of my skin From this single birth reborn that I am to be so— My own Identity now nameless neither man nor dragon or God but the dreaming Me full of physical rays' tender red moons in my belly & Stars in my eyes circling And the Sun the Sun the Sun my visible father making my body visible thru my eyes!

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity, who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes

If anybody wants a statement of values - it is this, that I am ready to die for poetry and for the truth that inspires poetry - and will do so in any case - as all men, wether they like it or not-.

We're stuck in our Selves, And who else to be stuck in? - New York to San Fran

Stop all fantasy! live in the physical world moment to moment - Dawn

We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread...

I'm with you in Rockland, where we are great writers on this same dreadful typewriter.

I know too much and not enough.

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

Everyman's an angel!

Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time! Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations

The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them The privilege to witness my existence—you too must seek the sun

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

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, 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, 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...

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

Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith – and the art! to persist.

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision. —  Allen Ginsberg, The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems: 1937-1952 . (Da Capo Press; 1st Da Capo Press Ed edition November 1, 2006)

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul?

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

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 wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.