Allen Ginsberg Quotes

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

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.

I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20c. (Havana 1953)

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

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

Mothers weep and Sons be dumb
your brothers and children murder the beautiful yellow bodies of Indochina in dreams invented for your eyes by TV

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked...

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war...

who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall...

who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts...

. . . who were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality. . .

The whole blear world
of smoke and twisted steel
around my head in a railroad
car, and my mind wandering
past the rust into futurity:
I saw the sun go down
in a carnal and primeval
world, leaving darkness
to cover my railroad train
because the other side of the
world was waiting for dawn.

I write poetry because I want to be alone and want to talk to people.

Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

I could issue manifestos summoning seraphim to revolt against the Heavenly State we're in, or trumpets to summon American mankind to rebellion against the Authority which has frozen all skulls in the cold war, That is, I could, make sense, invoke politics and try organize a union of opinion about what to do to Cuba, China, Russia, Bolivia, New Jersey, etc. However since in America the folks are convinced their heaven is all right, those manifestos make no dent except in giving authority & courage to the small band of hipsters who are disaffected like gentle socialists. Meanwhile the masses the proletariat the people are smug and the source of the great Wrong. So the means then is to communicate to the grand majority- and say I or anybody did write a balanced documented account not only of the lives of America but the basic theoretical split from the human body as Reich has done- But the people are so entrenched in their present livelihood that all the facts in the world-such as that China will be 1/4 of world pop makes no impression at all as a national political fact that intelligent people can take counsel on and deal with humorously & with magnificence. So that my task as a politician is to dynamite the emotional rockbed of inertia and spiritual deadness that hangs over the cities and makes everybody unconsciously afraid of the cops- To enter the Soul on a personal level and shake the emotion with the Image of some giant reality-of any kind however irrelevant to transient political issue- to touch & wake the soul again- That soul which is asleep or hidden in armor or unable to manifest itself as free life of God on earth- To remind by chord of deep groan of the Unknown to most Soul- then further politics will take place when people seize power over their universe and end the long dependence on an external authority or rhetorical set sociable emotions-so fixed they don't admit basic personal life changes-like not being afraid of jails and penury, while wandering thru gardens in high civilization.

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