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Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Age: 101 †
Born: 1919
Born: March 24
Died: 2021
Died: February 22
Activist Shareholder
Journalist
Military Officer
Painter
Peace Activist
Playwright
Poet
Publisher
Translator
Writer
Yonkers
New York State
Feilingedi
Lawrence Ferling
L. Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti
Poetry
Imagination
Streetlight
Imaginations
Cast
Casts
Shadow

More quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
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Today America's on the wrong side of the world revolution. What I mean by that is, the world revolution is the people's revolution, the liberation movements in all the third world countries, which when everyone tries to get started the U.S. stops.
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Poetry can change the world, just like any art can change the world, by changing consciousness. Of course this was the great slogan of the nineteen sixites hippies’ revolution—enlarge the area of consciousness, which quite often was done by psychedelic means.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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My country tears of thee.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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We have to raise the consciousness the only way poets can change the world is to raise the consciousness of the general populace.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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If you're too open-minded your brains will fall out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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We were just a one-room bookstore we didn't have any money for lawyers.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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To say one is revolutionary is a little like saying one is a Zen Buddhist - if you say you are, you probably aren't.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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In Goya's greatest scenes we seem to see the people of the world exactly at the moment when they first attained the title of 'suffering humanity
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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The future of publishing lies with the small and medium-sized presses, because the big publishers in New York are all part of huge conglomerates.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors everything depends on the money.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti