Quote collection
165 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art."
"You too must seek the sun."
"The censorship of language is the censorship of consciousness."
"War is good business Invest your son"
"The hero surviving his own murder, his own suicide, his own addiction, surviving his own disappearance from the scene"
"The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?"
"Man’s usurpation over nature is an egotism that will destroy human as well as whale kingdoms. … Academies should return to wisdom study in tree groves rather than robot study in plastic cells"
"I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator."
"Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph"
"Breathe when you breathe. Walk where you walk. Talk when you talk. Cry when you cry. Die when you die. Let go when you let go."
"Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie."
"I learned a world from each / one whom I loved"
"What came is gone forever every time"
"I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America."
"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."
"So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'"
"First thoughts are the strongest."
"The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded."
"Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind."
"The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!"