Beatnik Quotes

“If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.”
― Jack Kerouac

“[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.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“Will be but corpses dressed in frocks,
who cannot speak to birds or rocks.”
― Gary Snyder

“The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity.”
― Jack Kerouac

“I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“I am all men and so I am
Fully implicated in all men’s crimes.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Praise Lord, if you can’t have fun turn to religion.”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“Death is just a hapless, / Derelict alcoholic / Wandering the labyrinthine / Streets of time, / Tracing arbitrary, Impotent lines / That cannot contain / An infinite soul / To a finite time.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Maybe that’s what death is—
When our curiosity
Gets the better of us
And is finally fully satisfied
When we take that last big leap
Off the edge of our lives,
Foregoing our present reality,
Undermining our seeming immortality,
Undertaking the fatal freefall
Of understanding all,
Momentarily seeing clearly,
Comprehending completely,
Realizing thoroughly and literally
That everything
Is nothing After all.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“We, too, are beings
Loitering until dispatched—
The eggs of ghosts
Waiting to hatch.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Time is relative, so
There’s no time left to live.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“All brace to taste life’s bitter curse—
A second birth, but in reverse—
A return to the cold, hard womb of earth.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Dove-white dawn illumes life’s worth
As mourners load crow-black hearse
To feed remains to hungry dirt.
From nothing to nothing, from dust to dust.
Life delays, then betrays;
It is death alone that we can trust.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Craving immortality, my mind masters fraud:
My spirit’s projected as my brain cells applaud.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Man, thou art lust and unto lust
Thou has returned.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[I]t is said,
“Patience is a virtue.”
But I know, instead,
Patience is a vulture,
Made up of time,
Picking at my spine.
Pick, tick...
Pick, tick...
Pick, tick...
Die.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“I am a criminal for just existing
When I know that any crime
Is being committed anywhere—
Not crimes against law,
But real crimes against
JUSTICE, PEACE, LIFE.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[W]hat we think is real is only
a mind virus of synthetic words, quite empty,
and ready to fall like a house of cards
at the slightest provocation,
the slightest exploration.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Possessions are the weights on our chains,
designating us indentured servants in this game,
as time-saving devices erase time all the same—”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Smoking factories are the only real life here.
Living human corpses form their precious fuel—
fools ruled by more greedy, more ruthless fools.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[W]e ourselves are
the skeletons who scare us,
faux grownups who could never care for us,
left alone to watch in terror as all life is extinguished again.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[T]he fine line between life and death, we finally find, is no line at all.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“tick... tock... tick... tock…
this mocking by clocks
never stops,
until it does—
and then we rot.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“And, so, the poet who sees deepest
Is rooted out quickest—before he can
Infect the masses with his utopian visions,
Slay their despair, ease their burdens,
Restore their hopes, unleash their dreams.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“The poet floats above—
Stateless, ageless, timeless, guileless—
A creator of beauty,
An excavator of truth,
A healer of fear,
A harbinger of love.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[T]errorism is a godsend to the State,
Allowing it to follow its natural tendency
To move away from democracy.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“at the end of the tunnel—
not light, just night.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“I was about to be swallowed
By my mother's womb—
Where I might enjoy again
The perfect solitude of death.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave