Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.

How mercy gets to exist, where it comes from, perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem — an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe.

I am bored with these frantic cravings, tired of them and therefore myself, and contemptuous though tolerant of all my vast powers of self-pity and self-expressive misery.

I hadn't thought about what any army trains for. It merely maintains itself here for no exterior purpose.

Why are you afraid to submit to the annihilation of such stupid meaningless unreal knowledge. This is the abyss. Everything is green, love, without the logical fantastic equivocations that we invent so that we won't actually have to face each other.

I was so sick that I found myself worrying about the future of man's soul, my own in particular.

Money! Money! Money! shrieking mad celestial money of illusion! Money made of nothing, starvation, suicide! Money of failure! Money of death! Money against Eternity! and eternity's strong mills grind out vast paper of Illusion!

How strange to remember anything, even a button much less a universe. 'What creature gives birth to itself?' The universe is mad, slightly mad.

You know, the guys there were so beautiful—they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.

My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.

The world knows the love that's in its breast as in the flower, the suffering lonely world. — Allen Ginsberg, from "Transcription of Organ Music," Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Books, 1994)

I smoke marijuana every chance I get.

Death which is the mother of the universe!—Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage sealed behind the sky—no revolution might destroy that maidenhood

Where are we going, Walt Whitman?

Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! -and you, García Lorca, what were you doing by the watermelons?

fortunately all governments will fall the only ones which won't fall are the good ones and the good ones don't yet exist

Am I a Stalinist? A Capitalist? A Bourgeois Stinker? A rotten Red? No I'm a fairy with purple wings and white halo translucent as an onion ring in the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev Restaurant after a hard day's work

America when will you be angelic? When will you take off your clothes?

Give, share, loose—lest we die, unbloomed.

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.

Now is the time of prophecy without death as a consequence the universe will ultimately disappear Hollywood will rot on the windmills of Eternity Hollywood whose movies stick in the throat of God Yes Hollywood will get what it deserves Time Seepage of nerve-gas over the radio History will make this poem prophetic and its awful silliness a hideous spiritual music I have the moan of doves and the feather of ecstasy Man cannot long endure the hunger of the cannibal abstract

None of us understand what we're doing, but we do beautiful things anyway.

Man is no form no mighty molecule no just idea alone — all that Thing — I feel man tender radiance at Heart between breast and belly, that physical place where the Self urges — delicate sensation

It occurs to me that I am America. I am talking to myself again.