Quotes from Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace' One grand boulevard with trees with one grand cafe in sun with strong black coffee in very small cups. One not necessarily very beautiful man or woman who loves you. One fine day.

Fuck Art, let's Dance!

Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking

It was a face which darkness could kill in an instant a face as easily hurt by laughter or light 'We think differently at night' she told me once lying back languidly And she would quote Cocteau 'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking' Then she would smile and look away light a cigarette for me sigh and rise and stretch her sweet anatomy let fall a stocking

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

I didn't know that painters and writers retired. They're like soldiers – they just fade away.

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn, that Bridge was too much for me.

I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication.

Poetry is the shortest distance between two humans.

See it was like this when we waltz into this place. A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-step And I says Dad let's cut but then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really exist Wow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.

Think long thoughts in short sentences.

in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence.

Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

I am waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth... without taxes

I once started out to walk around the world but ended up in Brooklyn.

I have seen giraffes in junglejims their necks like love wound around the iron circumstances of the world.

Cast up the heart flops over gasping 'Love' a foolish fish which tries to draw its breath from flesh of air And no one there to hear its death among the sad bushes where the world rushes by in a blather of asphalt and delay

The best writing is what's right in front of you. Sometimes I'd walk down the street with poets and they wouldn't see anything. I'd have to shake their arm and say, 'Look! Look!

Let us arise and go now to the Isle of Manisfree and live the true blue simple life of wisdom and wonderment where all things grow straight up aslant and singing in the yellow sun poppies out of cowpods thinking angels out of turds. I must arise and go now to the Isle of Manisfree way up behind the broken words and woods of Arcady.

Everything the Beats stood for was the opposite of the dominant culture today.

Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap