Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.

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.

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.

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.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.

I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight,the weight we carry is love.

Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.

We're all golden sunflowers inside.

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.

Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.

Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction

Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!

I never dreamed the sea so deep, The earth so dark; so long my sleep, I have become another child. I wake to see the world go wild.

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

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.