Quotes from Allen Ginsberg

I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.

To gain your own voice, forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province and your own consciousness.

Just because I like to suck cock doesn't make me any less American than Jesse Helms.

Everybody's serious but me.

What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? - Howl

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.

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

You see those guys wearing baggy pants, descendants of the parachute pants, wearing an odd, weird Frankenstein haircut. It all comes out of Peter Lorre.

Our heads are round so thought can change direction

There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.

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

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

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

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

My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.

with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls

My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

Candor disarms paranoia.

I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.