It isn’t enough for your heart to break because everybody’s heart is broken now.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Sadness
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’.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Mental Illness
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: News, Equality, Media
The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Love
Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine,
jiggling your knees blankly in the rain.
When it snows in your nose
you catch cold in your brain.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Drugs
Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Media
When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.
—Allen Ginsberg
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.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Art
The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Poetry, Awareness
Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection – with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Goodness
Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go … .
—Allen Ginsberg
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Attachment
No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake’s illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet’s oceanic horizon. No harm.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Drugs
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Poets, Poetry, Art
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Madness, Insanity
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.
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Poets, Poetry
Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!
—Allen Ginsberg
Topics: Democracy
My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
—Allen Ginsberg
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
- Frank O’Hara American Poet, Art Critic
- Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
- John Fowles English Novelist
- Susan Sontag American Writer, Philosopher
- Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
- Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
- Richard Wright American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
- John Updike American Author
- Audre Lorde American Poet, Feminist
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