We're still in a state of shock … We have our "Dump Bush and Cheney" sign in the window, which Lawrence [Ferlinghetti] painted himself. We're looking… - Nancy Peters

When I joined City Lights in 1971 and started working with Lawrence, it was clear that it had been very much a center of protest, for people with revolutionary ideas and people who wanted to change society. And when I first began working at the little editorial office up on Filbert and Grant, people that Lawrence had known through the whole decade of the '60s were dropping in all the time, like Paul Krassner, Tim Leary, people who were working with underground presses and trying to provide an alternative to mainstream media. This was a period of persecution, and FBI infiltration of those presses.

He found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the gothic castle — a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed.

The most important of the beat poets. He was a really true poet with an original voice, probably the most lyrical of those poets.