Quotes from Howl and Other Poems

“Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war, ”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!
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!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!
The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
holy as you my soul are holy!
The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is
holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!
Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy
Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-
sady holy the unknown buggered and suffering
beggars holy the hideous human angels!
Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks
of the grandfathers of Kansas!
Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop
apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana
hipsters peace & junk & drums!
Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy
the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the
mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!
Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the
middle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-
ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!
Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &
Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow
Holy Istanbul!
Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the
clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy
the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!
Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the
locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-
tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the
abyss!
Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!
bodies! suffering! magnanimity!
Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent
kindness of the soul!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“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, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

- Howl”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“No rest
without love,
No sleep
without dreams
of love -
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines
the final wish
is love.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Who dreamt
and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed,
and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together
jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. ”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“No rest without love,
no sleep without dreams of love-
be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines,
the final wish is love
-cannot be bitter, cannot deny,
cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“All these books are published in Heaven.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human -
looks out of the heart
burning with purity -
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love -
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
- cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

- must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye -

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“You too must seek the sun...”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“He saw that I was shy, and at the time I was still scared of feeling with another person, so he put his arm around me and pulled me and put my head on his breast and gave me love actually.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“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!
Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is
holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an
angel!”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas?
Are you my Angel?”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“What is obscenity? And to whom?”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“..who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality..”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

“Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Howl and Other Poems

About the author

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