Allen Ginsberg

Poets are damned… but see with the eyes of angels.

The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet be fully alive.

No rest without love, No sleep without dreams of love – be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines the final wish is love.

Love is key to an exciting life and the moment you leave the world of love, you lose the best life.

The most important thing about dreams is the existence in them of magical emotions, to which waking consciousness is not ordinarily sentient. Awe of vast constructions; familiar eternal halls of buildings; sexual intensity in rapport; deathly music; grief awakenings, perfected lodgings.

What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body!

There can only be satisfaction in knowing that everyone plays a role and everything acts in perfect balance. Illusion is dangerous, ultimately poisonous. The blank infinity of dreams forever to be tempered with reality.

Illusion is dangerous, ultimately poisonous.

First thought, best thought.

I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.

We are all vulnerable together, the sane and the mad, and in the end we will all experience madness in at least some secret or small way.

There's an end to suffering when you understand the openness of things. And that the way out would be to have a right view of it, (that is an understanding of the whole situation, the whole transitory situation), a right view, then the right ambition, (to be free of attachment), and then the right thought, (clear thought on the subject, that you're not fuzzily looking for a..'Mary, save me') – Then, from that right speech, you're explaining clearly that we are, in a sense, empty.

I had this funny idea, yeah what if there were peace. yeah you know then how are they ever going to clean it up you know the disorder that's been created by the Serbians. and by Muslims who have blood on their hands and the Croatians all of them have blood on their hands... who's ever going to disentangle all the confusion rubble that's been created by the war you know they they destroyed law they destroyed families they destroyed communities how's it ever going to get put together again even if there were peace.

I think that's thy poison of poetry and I think that's the poison of political activity. As soon as you've got an obligation, you're a prisoner of an obligation, you're no longer actually reacting openly to what you see in front of you as reality.

What's sacred when the Thing is all the universe?

A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.

Love is only a recognition of our own guilt and imperfection, and a supplication for forgiveness to the perfect beloved. This is why we love those who are more beautiful than ourselves, why we fear them, and why we must be unhappy lovers.

America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.

I feel my life is sterile, I am unbloomed, unused, I have nothing I can have that I will ever want, only some love, only dearness and tenderness, to make me weep. I am moved now and sad and unhappy beyond cold unhappiness, beyond any inconvenience that will cause you by my affection.