Lawrence Ferlinghetti > Quotes

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Americus, Book I

“If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Poetry is a naked woman, a naked man, and the distance between them.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art

“I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am
constantly shocking”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Fuck Art, let's Dance!”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Wild Dreams of a New Beginning

“I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light

'We think differently at night'
she told me once
lying back languidly

And she would quote Cocteau

'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
'whom I am constantly shocking'

Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise

and stretch
her sweet anatomy

let fall a stocking”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Pictures of the Gone World

“I once started out
to walk around the world
but ended up in Brooklyn,
that Bridge was too much for me.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“See
it was like this when
we waltz into this place.
A couple of papish cats
is doing an Aztec two-step

And I says
Dad let's cut
but then this dame
comes up behind me see
and says
you and me could really exist

Wow I says
Only the next day
she has bad teeth
and really hates
poetry.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Don't bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology

“I am waiting for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe for anarchy”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“[in the true mad north] of introspection,
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die, glimpsing in their
dying fall, all life's memory of existence.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind