Allen Ginsberg
Howl, Beat poet
Sayings by Allen Ginsberg
Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
The LSD was sort of human but I was getting big reptilian nonhuman scaly dragon cosmoses out of it which made me throw up and I didn't see why I should be intimidated by anyone's consciousness, even my own…
I took a lot of LSD and Psilocybin previous to leaving for India and…well, I was in a slightly disordered state of mind. I thought it was absolutely necessary for me to drop dead in order to obtain complete enlightenment—for my ego to vanish entirely and for my person to vanish entirely and everything about me to vanish entirely in order to be perfect.
The anxiety was directly traceable to fear of being apprehended and treated as a deviant criminal; put thru the hassle of social disapproval, ignominious Kafkian tremblings in vast court buildings coming to be judged, the helplessness of being overwhelmed by force or threat of deadly force and put in brick & iron cell.
How much of the juvenile delinquency and robbery and problematic crimes in New York that are clogging all the courts and making everything such a mess might be traceable to narcotics crimes which could all be eliminated by simply changing the treatment of narcotics! If you sent all the junkies to doctors the black market would disappear. if you legalize marijuana there will be no use for a narcotics department.
Actually one has to think of them, too. How can their problem be solved?—because they're hooked to the drugs, their whole existence depends on drugs. If the drug problem didn't exist, if the whole problem were solved, they would be left jobless.
I don't think there is any truth. There are only points of view.
The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and anus holy!
I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man — and explore relationships that way.
I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
There is nothing to be learned from history anymore. We're in science fiction now.
Death let you out, Death had the Mercy, you're done with your century, done with God.
I will think nothing but beautiful thoughts.
No more to say, and nothing to weep for but the Beings in the Dream, trapped in its disappearance, sighing, screaming with it, buying and selling pieces of phantom, worshipping each other, worshipping the God included in it all—longing or inevitability? —while it lasts, a Vision—anything more?
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.
I can't stand my own mind.
America when will you take off your clothes? When will you look at yourself through the grave?
Your machinery is too much for me. You made me want to be a saint.
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.
It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.