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I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

Allen Ginsberg

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Allen Ginsberg
Age: 70 †
Born: 1926
Born: June 3
Died: 1997
Died: April 5
Autobiographer
Diarist
Musician
Photographer
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Teacher
Writer
Paterson
New Jersey
Irwin Allen Ginsberg
Ayālena Gīnasabārga
Alen Ginzberg
Empty
Thoughts
Wasn
Kerouac
Saying
Burroughs
Literature
Skull
Talking
Skulls
Think
Ran
Thinking
Realized

More quotes by Allen Ginsberg

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Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions. Notice what you notice. Observe what's vivid. Catch yourself thinking. Vividness is self-selecting. And remember the future.
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Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!
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he threw up his hands and wrote the Universe dont exist and died to prove it
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The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.
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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
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I'm an old man now, and a lonesome man in Kansas / but not afraid / to speak my lonesomeness in a car, / because not only my lonesomeness / it's Ours, all over America, / O tender fellows --/ & spoken lonesomeness is Prophecy / in the moon 100 years ago or in / the middle of Kansas now.
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Now I have enough money to travel wherever I want, but I haven't got the health.
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
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You can't photograph everything.
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Recent history is the record of one vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind.
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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.'
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If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction
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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.
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Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.
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I am learning by the week, but my poesy is still not my own. New rhyme, new me me me in words. I am not all this carven rhetoric.
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Tell your secrets. [In reply to the question How does one become a prophet?]
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We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the mirror of art, fascinated by our own deformities.
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Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!
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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.
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We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
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