Allen Ginsberg · 119 pages
Rating: (1.4K votes)
“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”
“America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb”
“The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burde of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is 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”
“The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt—industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown—
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these
entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!”
“No point writing when the spirit doth not lead.”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked... who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts...”
“Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity
the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear up Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife
- Death to Van Gogh's Ear!”
“fortunately all governments will fall
the only ones which won't fall are the good ones
and the good ones don't yet exist”
“The message is: Widen the area of consciousness.”
“We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside”
“Sir, my inferior understanding prevents my grasping the unquestionable soundness of the mission.”
“She definitely has a crush on you. It's about the size of Jupiter.”
“I just—we were talking, and we fell asleep. I swear, we didn’t, um—’’
‘‘Yeah, you’d better not have ummed.”
“Many of us who aren't farmers or gardeners still have some element of farm nostalgia in our family past, real or imagined: a secret longing for some connection to a life where a rooster crows in the yard.”
“Go try your charming act on some tramp with low self-esteem, because I'm not falling for it.”
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