15 Quotes Tagged: beat-generation

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.

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.

I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

বিবাহের অবিরাম বেদনা
বিবাহের অবিরাম বেদনা:
উরু আর জিভ, হে প্রিয়,
এর সঙ্গে বেশ ভারি,
তা দাঁতে স্পন্দিত হয়

আমরা আংশিদারীর চেষ্টা করি
কিন্তু ফিরিয়ে দেয়া হয়, হে প্রিয়,
প্রত্যেকে আর প্রত্যেকে

এটা হল প্রকাণ্ড হাঙর আর আমরা
তার পেটের ভেতরে
আনন্দ খুঁজি, কোনও আনন্দ
যা এর বাইরে জানা যাবে না
দুই বনাম দুই এর সিন্দুকের
মধ্যে এর অবিরাম বেদনা ।

Exterminate all rational thought

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.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!

I'm alone in the sky
where there's nothing to lose
The Sun's not eternal
That's why there's the blues
Majestical jailhouse
our Joy's in the Cage
Hearts full of hatred
will outlast my old age

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.

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins,
eyes and ears full of marijuana,
eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border
or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman;
rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun;
rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati;
rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies;
rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver,
pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain,
come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage,
streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions,
with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp,
screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality,
screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world,
blood streaming from my belly and shoulders
flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways
by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

I forgave everybody, I gave up, I got drunk.

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way — a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America — beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction — We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer — It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization — the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation — The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it — But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds — We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...