allen ginsberg Quotes

It isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.

I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism

The parts that embarrass you the most are usually the most interesting poetically, are usually the most naked of all, the rawest, the goofiest, the strangest and most eccentric and at the same time, most representative, most universal… That was something I earned from Kerouac, which was that spontaneous writing could be embarrassing… The cure for that is to write the thing down which you will not publish and which you won’t show people. To write secretly… so you can actually be free to say anything you want.

[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 want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator.

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

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

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

They [Nicaragua] haven’t had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?

Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.

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.