Allen Ginsberg Quotes

American poet and writer (1926–1997)

Irwin Allen Ginsberg (3 June 1926 – 5 April 1997) was an American poet born in Newark, New Jersey. He was a central figure among Beat Generation writers. Ginsberg is best known for "Howl", a long poem about consumer society's negative human values.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Irwin Allen Ginsberg

Alternative Names: Alan Ginsberg

From Wikidata (CC0)

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.

Always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious
but me.

America this is quite serious

now the Great Fear's rolled round the world and washes over Newspaper Grey air

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

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

Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye — corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns? This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond Someone to hear me there

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

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.

How mercy gets to exist, where it comes from, perhaps can be seen from the inner evidence and images of the poem — an act of self-realization, self acceptance and the consequent and inevitable relaxation of protective anxiety and self hood and the ability to see and love others in themselves as angels without stupid mental self deceiving moral categories selecting who it is safe to sympathize with and who is not safe.

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.

I want to know I want I want ridiculous to know to know WHAT rotting ginsberg I want to know what happens after I rot because I’m already rotting my hair’s falling out I’ve got a belly I’m sick of sex my ass drags in the universe I know too much and not enough I want to know what happens after I die well I’ll find out soon enough do I really need to know now? is that any use at all use use use death death death death death god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger the rhythm of the typewriter

Without even intending it, there is that little shiver of a moment in time preserved in the crystal cabinet of the mind. A little shiver of internal space. That's what I was looking for.

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?

Death which is the mother of the universe! — Now wear your nakedness forever, white flowers in your hair, your marriage sealed behind the sky — no revolution might destroy that maidenhood