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The actual materials are important. A book at the nightstand is important - a light you can get at - or a flashlight as Kerouac had a brakeman's latern.

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
Actual
Materials
Light
Book
Important
Nightstand
Writing
Kerouac
Flashlight
Flashlights

More quotes by Allen Ginsberg

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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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Well, while I'm here I'll do the work — and what's the work? To ease the pain of living. Everything else, drunken dumbshow.
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Let go of the spirit of the departed, and continue the celebration of your own life.
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who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism
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I learned a world from each / one whom I loved
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The desire to have power dissolves. The desire to dominate people for love dissolves. On the other hand, it's a relief to realize you can let go.
Allen Ginsberg
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War is good business Invest your son
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Taxi September along Jessore Road Oxcart skeletons drag charcoal load past watery fields thru rain flood ruts Dung cakes on treetrunks, plastic-roof huts Wet processions Families walk Stunted boys big heads don't talk Look bony skulls & silent round eyes Starving black angels in human disguise.
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When it snows in your nose, you catch cold in your brain.
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My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
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Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
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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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America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
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.
Allen Ginsberg
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We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
Allen Ginsberg
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You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening. If you're grasping to get your own voice, you're making a strained attempt to talk, so it's a matter of just listening to yourself as you sound when you're talking about something that's intensely important to you.
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From it's inception Beat poetry was hailed as something NEW and like all good spontaneous jazz, newness is acceptable and expected - by hip people who listen. But the newness of jazz has in it the echoes of J. S. Bach.
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They [Nicaragua] haven't had elections because they are in a state of seige by the United States. They would have had elections if the U.S. had left them alone. But the U.S. has mounted a full scale war against them. So how can you ask them to behave normally?
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Because systems of mass communication can communicate only officially acceptable levels of reality, no one can know the extent of the secret unconscious life. No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control.
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I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.
Allen Ginsberg