Collected Poems 1947-1997 Quotes

“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, Collected Poems 1947-1997

“Many seek and never see,
anyone can tell them why.
O they weep and O they cry
and never take until they try
unless they try it in their sleep
and never some until they die.
I ask many, they ask me.
This is a great mystery.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947-1997

“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, Collected Poems 1947-1997

“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 hallucinations 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, Collected Poems 1947-1997

“What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“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, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“I want to know I want I want ridiculous to know to know WHAT rotting ginsberg I want to know what happens after I rot because I’m already rotting my hair’s falling out I’ve got a belly I’m sick of sex my ass drags in the universe I know too much and not enough I want to know what happens after I die well I’ll find out soon enough do I really need to know now? is that any use at all use use use death death death death death god god god god god god god the Lone Ranger the rhythm of the typewriter”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death, and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“Am I a Stalinist? A Capitalist? A
Bourgeois Stinker? A rotten Red?
No I’m a fairy with purple wings and white halo
translucent as an onion ring in
the transsexual fluorescent light of Kiev
Restaurant after a hard day’s work”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“I want to return to normal
—but there is no changelessness
but in Nirvana
Or is there
Ever Rest, Lord?—and what sages
know and sit.
I’m a spy
in Bloomfield on a park bench
—frightened by buses—”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“The Night-Apple Last night I dreamed
of one I loved
for seven long years,
but I saw no face,
only the familiar
presence of the body:
sweat skin eyes
feces urine sperm
saliva all one
odor and mortal taste.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“This is the one and only
firmament; therefore
it is the absolute world.
There is no other world.
The circle is complete.
I am living in Eternity.
The ways of this world
are the ways of Heaven.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“An Eastern Ballad I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak. I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“Many seek and never see, anyone can tell them why. O they weep and O they cry and never take until they try unless they try it in their sleep and never some until they die. I ask many, they ask me. This is a great mystery.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, I want to breathe freely.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“I am not all now but a universe of skin and breath
& changing thought and
burning hand & softened
heart in the old bed of
my skin From this single
birth reborn that I am
to be so— My own Identity now nameless
neither man nor dragon or
God but the dreaming Me full
of physical rays’ tender
red moons in my belly &
Stars in my eyes circling And the Sun the Sun the
Sun my visible father
making my body visible
thru my eyes!”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“In this dream I am the Dreamer
and the Dreamed I am
that I am Ah but I have
always known”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“Myself, anyhow, maybe as old as the universe—and I guess that dies with us—enough to cancel all that comes—What came is gone forever every time— That’s good! That leaves it open for no regret—no fear radiators, lacklove, torture even toothache in the end— Though while it comes it is a lion that eats the soul—and the lamb, the soul, in us, alas, offering itself in sacrifice to change’s fierce hunger—hair and teeth—and the roar of bonepain, skull bare, break rib, rot-skin, braintricked Implacability. Ai! ai! we do worse! We are in a fix! And you’re out, Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you’re done with your century, done with God, done with the path thru it—Done with yourself at last—Pure —Back to the Babe dark before your Father, before us all—before the world— There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you’ve gone, it’s good.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“The kindly search for growth, the gracious desire to exist of the flowers, my near ecstasy at existing among them The privilege to witness my existence—you too must seek the sun”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“me being no one in the air
nothing but clouds in the moonlight
with humans fucking
underneath… .”
― Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947-1997

“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, Collected Poems, 1947-1997