Ginsberg Quotes

“You know me now. I’m only good at beginnings.”
― Allen Ginsberg

“Millions of fathers in rain
Millions of mothers in pain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of sisters nowhere to go

Millions of daughters walk in the mud
Millions of children wash in the flood
A million girls vomit and groan
Millions of families hopeless alone”
― Allen Ginsberg, Poems

“By the 'best minds' Ginsberg meant the dropouts, poets, musicians and world travellers, as opposed to doctors and lawyers. He understood that Wrong Planet people tend to pick up better communication skills, have greater visualisation, and can adapt to changing circumstances quicker than Rag, Tag & Bobtail.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“America this is quite serious”
― allen ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“I eat a catfish sandwich
with onions and red sauce
20c. (Havana 1953)”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.

Always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious.
Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious
but me.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“I'm alone in the sky
where there's nothing to lose
The Sun's not eternal
That's why there's the blues
Majestical jailhouse
our Joy's in the Cage
Hearts full of hatred
will outlast my old age”
― Allen Ginsberg, White Shroud

“It’s almost as if Bronson, Ginsberg and Bowie craved the freedom of letting go, of pushing their mind aside and allowing the vampires and demons and all the other freaks to run them so that they could slip away elsewhere”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Balanceándose y rodando en la banca de la
soledad de medianoche reinos dolmen del amor,
sueño de la vida de una pesadilla, cuerpos
convertidos en piedra tan pesada como la
luna”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl

“But all I could think of was taking some books to read in jail. I held everybody up, choosing which ones to take.”
― John Clellon Holmes, Go

“Ginsberg was the favourite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out.”
― Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

“The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city’s southern limits.
I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales—and poets searching for rhymes in history’s junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn’t our own. Still our country wasn’t our own.”
― Jasmin Darznik, Song of a Captive Bird

“What happens to a highbrow literary culture when its fault lines-along caste, class and gender-are brutally exposed? What happens to the young iconoclasts who dare to speak and write about these issues openly? Is there such a thing as a happy ending for revolutionaries? Or are they doomed to be forever relegated to the footnotes of history?

This is the never-before-told true story of the Hungry Generation (or 'the Hungryalists')-a group of barnstorming, anti-establishment poets, writers and artists in Bengal in the 1960s. Braving social boycott, ridicule and arrests, the Hungryalists changed the literary landscape of Bengal (and many South Asian countries) forever. Along the way, they also influenced iconic poets, such as Allen Ginsberg, who struck up a lifelong friendship with the Hungryalists.”
― Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, The Hungryalists

“We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread...”
― Allen Ginsberg

“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, The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952

“Without much ado, Ginsberg, along with Orlovsky and Fakir, arrived one Sunday at the Coffee House looking for Bengali poets. The cafe was abuzz with writers, editors and journalists. Each group had a different table—some had joined two or more tables and brought together different conversations on one plate. But somehow, everyone seemed to have an inchoate understanding of the business of war and what it spelled out for them in the end.”
― Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, The Hungryalists

“Now as the train moved towards Calcutta, Malay felt as if his life was coming full circle. It had been a strange decision to visit the city at a time when post-Partition vomit and excreta was splattered on Calcutta streets. Marked by communal violence, anger and unemployment, the streets smelled of hunger and disillusionment. Riots were still going on. The wound of a land divided lingered, refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) continued to arrive in droves. And since they did not know where to go, they occupied the pavements, laced the streets with their questions, frustrations and a deep need to be recognised as more than an inconvenient presence on tree-lined avenues.

The feeling of being uprooted was everywhere. Political leaders decided that the second phase of the five-year planning needed to see the growth of heavy industries. The land required for such industries necessitated the evacuation of farmers. Devoid of their ancestral land and in the absence of a proper rehabilitation plan, those evicted wandered aimlessly around the cities—refugees by another name.

Calcutta had assumed different dimensions in Malay’s mind. The smell of the Hooghly wafted across Victoria Memorial and settled like an unwanted cow on its lawns. Unsung symphonies spilled out of St Paul’s Cathedral on lonely nights; white gulls swooped in on grey afternoons and looked startling against the backdrop of the rain-swept edifice. In a few years, Naxalbari would become a reality, but not yet. Like an infant Kali with bohemian fantasies, Calcutta and its literature sprouted a new tongue – that of the Hungry Generation. Malay, like Samir and many others, found himself at the helm of this madness, and poetry seemed to lick his body and soul in strange colours. As a reassurance of such a huge leap of faith, Shakti had written to Samir:

Bondhu Samir,

We had begun by speaking of an undying love for literature, when we suddenly found ourselves in a dream. A dream that is bigger than us, and one that will exist in its capacity of right and wrong and beyond that of our small worlds.

Bhalobasha juriye

Shakti”
― Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury, The Hungryalists