Allen Ginsberg Quotes

“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”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Playing ball of wind
reaching the other end of The Road Not Taken
may I call in Robert Frost by holding hands
and request Ginsberg to recite Howl
facing the world.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“You know me now. I’m only good at beginnings.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I have just discovered that I have no feelings, just thoughts, borrowed thoughts taken from someone I admire because he seems to have feelings.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“I'm afraid that you'll never understand me fully, and because of that, sometimes you'll be frightened, disgusted, annoyed, or pleased.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“Inside skull vast as outside skull”
― Allen Ginsberg, Cosmopolitan Greetings

“I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“You were right, I suppose, in keeping your distance. I was too intent on self-fulfillment, and rather crude about it, with all my harlequinade and conscious manipulation of your pity.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“Love is only a recognition of our own guilt and imperfection, and a supplication for forgiveness to the perfect beloved. This is why we love those who are more beautiful than ourselves, why we fear them, and why we must be unhappy lovers.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“I want to see you. I feel more and more at with you now actually than ever before, I feel you more, actually more clarity, more confidence, more trust.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“By the 'best minds' Ginsberg meant the dropouts, poets, musicians and world travellers, as opposed to doctors and lawyers. He understood that Wrong Planet people tend to pick up better communication skills, have greater visualisation, and can adapt to changing circumstances quicker than Rag, Tag & Bobtail.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Assuming I am mad (Ha!) god, how I must have suffered to go mad. And all the time I was calling to people to save me and no one put out his hand and held it. This is like suicide, only I am alive and looking out of this living death I can see the people weep and feel sorry. Alas, nobody even weeps. It's all a dream.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“It reminds me of a remark Lucien [Carr] once made to me: He said "You never seem to give yourself away completely, but of course dark-haired people are so mysterious.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“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.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“First thought, best thought.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Allen Ginsberg asked me to sign his book. I must've stood there for five minutes drawing a complete blank. Hi Allen, from one howl to another. Dear Allen I'm glad you think I'm a poet. Love, Eileen. I'm the only woman you like, right Allen? Only the craziest thoughts passed through my mind. Finally he started getting embarrassed. Just sign it. Come by and write something better when you think of it. I scrawled something. I forget what it was.”
― Eileen Myles, Chelsea Girls

“I hadn't thought about what any army trains for. It merely maintains itself here for no exterior purpose.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“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.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“Song
Allen Ginsberg

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.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human—
looks out of the heart
burning with purity—
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love—
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
—cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

—must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye—
**
yes, yes,
that’s what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I was surprised to find such an overwhelming preponderance of nervous wrecks who cracked under the initial "strain." There is a great deal of stupidity in the management of this place. The petty officers etc. are all fat buttocked Marine sergeants with loud voices. They talk a lot about order and discipline but the administrative and ordering sections are the most confused, contradictory, undisciplined and disorderly crowd I've ever met with and the atmosphere breathes lack of definition and fosters anxiety.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“I've realized something utterly strange and yet common, I think I've experienced the deep turning about. At present I am completely happy and feel completely free, I love everybody and intend to go on doing so, I know that I am an imaginary blossom and so it my literary life and my literary accomplishments are so many useless imaginary blossoms. Reality isn't images. But I do things anyhow because I am free from self, free from delusion, free from anger, I love everyone equally, as equally empty and equally coming Buddhas.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“There is a kind of dreary monotony about there characters, an American sameness about them that never varies and is always dull.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“I decided someday to become a Thoreau of the Mountains. To live like Jesus and Thoreau, except for women.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“When you write letters to me, try not to be sophomoric and moribund about your criticisms of Jean et son weltanschauung [and his worldview.] A little more finesse, please, or if possible, a dash of humor.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“He [William S Burroughs] has no patience for my kind of neurosis, I know... But since then I've been facing my nature full in the face and the result is a purge.”
― Jack Kerouac, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

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.”
― Allen Ginsberg, The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952

“Between the whiskers scraggling down his neck and the now-crooked glasses, he could have been the Black Allen Ginsberg.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire