Top 160 Allen Ginsberg Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Things are symbols of themselves.”

— Allen Ginsberg

52. “Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go...”

— Allen Ginsberg

53. “Just because I like to suck cock doesn’t make me any less American than Jesse Helms.”

— Allen Ginsberg

54. “I know I’m not God, are you? Don’t be silly. God? God? Everybody’s God? Don’t be silly.”

— Allen Ginsberg

55. “I want to be a saint, a real saint while I am young, for there is so much work to do.”

— Allen Ginsberg

56. “What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! – and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”

— Allen Ginsberg

57. “Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.”

— Allen Ginsberg

58. “We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.”

— Allen Ginsberg

59. “What came is gone forever every time.”

— Allen Ginsberg

60. “Fortunately art is a community effort – a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”

— Allen Ginsberg

61. “What is obscenity? And to whom?”

— Allen Ginsberg

62. “The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.”

— Allen Ginsberg

63. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

64. “All these books are published in Heaven.”

— Allen Ginsberg

65. “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit- man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!”

— Allen Ginsberg

66. “Candor disarms paranoia.”

— Allen Ginsberg

67. “Everybody’s serious but me.”

— Allen Ginsberg

68. “I’m with you in Rockland, where we are great writers on this same dreadful typewriter.”

— Allen Ginsberg

69. “The best thing about being famous is that it makes it easier to get laid.”

— Allen Ginsberg

70. “Ultimately Warhol’s private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.”

— Allen Ginsberg

71. “The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.”

— Allen Ginsberg

72. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

73. “I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.”

— Allen Ginsberg

74. “Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon he promises the stars he’ll make us a new universe if it comes to that.”

— Allen Ginsberg

75. “The poignancy of a photograph comes from looking back to a fleeting moment in a floating world. The transitoriness is what creates the sense of the sacred.”

— Allen Ginsberg

76. “You can’t escape the past in Paris, and yet what’s so wonderful about it is that the past and present intermingle so intangibly that it doesn’t seem to burden.”

— Allen Ginsberg

77. “Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.”

— Allen Ginsberg

78. “The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.”

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Allen Ginsberg

80. “Naked in solitary prison cell he looks down at a hard-on.”

— Allen Ginsberg

81. “Thank God I am not God! Thank God I am not God!”

— Allen Ginsberg

82. “Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?”

— Allen Ginsberg

83. “I have no other possessions of value but my soul.”

— Allen Ginsberg

84. “I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”

— Allen Ginsberg

85. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg

86. “A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.”

— Allen Ginsberg

87. “Sometime I’ll lay down my wrath, As I lay my body down Between the ache of breath and breath, Golden slumber in the bone.”

— Allen Ginsberg

88. “You know me now. I’m only good at beginnings.”

— Allen Ginsberg

89. “Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!”

— Allen Ginsberg

90. “You too must seek the sun...”

— Allen Ginsberg

91. “How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.”

— Allen Ginsberg

92. “From it’s inception Beat poetry was hailed as “something NEW” and “like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected – by hip people who listen.” But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.”

— Allen Ginsberg

93. “Inside skull vast as outside skull.”

— Allen Ginsberg

94. “Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection – with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.”

— Allen Ginsberg

95. “Subject is known by what she sees.”

— Allen Ginsberg

96. “Sanity – a trick of agreement.”

— Allen Ginsberg

97. “I shudder, I see the love, I’m doomed, my heart melts again – can’t stand not to be in love, can’t stand not to be melting with real tenderness, childlike need sweetnesses, that’s what’s wrong with me.”

— Allen Ginsberg

98. “Who’ll come lie down in the dark with me Belly to belly and knee to knee Who’ll look into my hooded eye Who’ll lie down under my darkened thigh?”

— Allen Ginsberg

99. “Bob Dylan’s one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.”

— Allen Ginsberg

100. “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.”

— Allen Ginsberg