Quote collection
165 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others"
"I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision."
"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."
"Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow."
"America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing."
"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"
"The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does. By poetry I mean the imagining of what has been lost and what can be found - the imagining of who we are and the slow realization of it."
"There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now."
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked."
"First thought, best thought."
"No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm."
"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"
"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."
"Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!"
"What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?"
"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."
"Candor disarms paranoia."
"Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light. Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in crookedness - to seek the light. Let the crookedness and straightness bespeak the light."
"It's never to late to do nothing at all."
"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."