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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.

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
Hurt
Deformities
Art
Deformity
Love
Opened
Fascinated
Staring
Wounds
Mirror
Mirrors

More quotes by Allen Ginsberg

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Poets are Damned... but See with the Eyes of Angels.
Allen Ginsberg
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Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight don't hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don't care who's listening.
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Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
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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.
Allen Ginsberg
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I know I'm not God, are you? Don't be silly. God? God? Everybody's God? Don't be silly.
Allen Ginsberg
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Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.
Allen Ginsberg
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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.
Allen Ginsberg
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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.
Allen Ginsberg
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That's what the shaman said. He didn't know what he was up against. He didn't expect the strength and weight and evil intensity of this spirit, this entity, as he called it. The same way the priest in an exorcism has to take on the spirit.
Allen Ginsberg
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What if someone gave a war and Nobody came?
Allen Ginsberg
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Everybody's serious but me.
Allen Ginsberg
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Candor disarms paranoia.
Allen Ginsberg
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To get on screen with the Talking Asshole, quite a feat. And it's certainly going to be a cult film that people will be seeing.
Allen Ginsberg
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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.'
Allen Ginsberg
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This is the one and only firmament therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven.
Allen Ginsberg
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The combination of drugs, homosexuality, some good prose recited on screen. . . . In the sweat lodge ceremony we went through, did you get any glimpse of the Ugly Spirit, what that was historically or biographically?
Allen Ginsberg
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A naked lunch is natural to us We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.
Allen Ginsberg
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Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.
Allen Ginsberg
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I don't do anything with my life except romanticize and decay with indecision.
Allen Ginsberg