Quotes from Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I have seen the Virgin in an appletree at Chartres And Saint Joan burn at the Bella Union. I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world. I have seen the Venus Aphrodite armless in her drafty corridor. I have heard a siren sing at One Fifth Avenue. I have seen the White Goddess dancing in the Rue des Beaux Arts on the Fourteenth of July and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy picking her nose in Chumley's.

and balancing on eye beams/ above a sea of faces/ paces his way/ to the other side of day

And heard the green birds singing/ from the other side of silence

Not like Dante discovering a commedia upon the slopes of heaven I would paint a different kind of Paradiso in which the people would be naked as they always are in scenes like that because it is supposed to be a painting of their souls but there would be no anxious angels telling them how heaven is the perfect picture of a monarchy and there would be no fires burning in the hellish holes below in which I might have stepped nor any altars in the sky except fountains of imagination

The light of San Francisco is a sea light an island light And the light of fog blanketing the hills drifting in at night through the Golden Gate to lie on the city at dawn...

Paper may burn but words will escape.

Like a bowl of roses, a poem should not have to be explained.

Blink at the sunned scratch and stumble into silence

I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer

I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds. They should all be freed. It is long since I was a herdsman.

Sometime during eternity some guys show up and one of them who shows up real late is a kind of carpenter from some square-type place like Galilee and he starts wailing and claiming he is hep to who made heaven and earth and that the cat who really laid it on us is his Dad

There is a stillness in the air, in the light of the dusk, in the eyes fixed forward, in the still end of life, an intolerable sweetness...

Yes the world is the best place of all for a lot of such things as making the fun scene and making the love scene and making the sad scene

Alcohol kills: Take LSD THE YOUNG MAKE LOVE, THE OLD MAKE OBSCENE GESTURES I'M A GROUCHO MARXIST "Revolution is the ecstasy of history" MAKE LOVE AND BEGIN AGAIN POWER TO THE IMAGINATION! "Nous sommes tous les enragés"—Ortega y Gasset TO FORBID IS FORBIDDEN Open the Windows of Your Heart MAKE LOVE NOT WAR THE SORBONNE IS THE STALINGRAD OF THE REVOLUTION!

A poetry reading builds up to a climax, and if it's a success it leaves the audience somewhat high." —Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Oh no I have not lain on Beauty Rests like this afraid to rise at night for fear that I might somehow miss some movement beauty might have made

The pennycandystore beyond the El is where i first fell in love with unreality Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom of that september afternoon A cat upon the counter moved among the licorice sticks and tootsie rolls and Oh Boy Gum Outside the leaves were falling as they died A wind had blown away the sun A girl ran in Her hair was rainy Her breasts were breathless in the little room Outside the leaves were falling and they cried Too soon! too soon!

I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and tv rights sold in advance to the natives

They were unmasked now, I saw them all for what they were, little sons and daughters of the eternal poor, the Lumpenproletariat, made only for slavery, for continued slavery. They wanted 'liberty' for everyone, in the abstract, but they couldn't give full liberty to anyone to act on his own!

I am a hill where poets run. I invented the alphabet after watching the flight of cranes who made letters with their legs. I am a lake upon a plain. I am a word in a tree. I am a hill of poetry. I am a raid on the inarticulate. I have dreamt that all my teeth fell out but my tongue lived to tell the tale. For I am a still of poetry. I am a bank of song. I am a playerpiano in an abandoned casino on a seaside esplanade in a dense fog still playing.

If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.

Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.