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Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Age: 101 †
Born: 1919
Born: March 24
Died: 2021
Died: February 22
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Yonkers
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Lawrence Ferling
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More quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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If you're too open-minded your brains will fall out.
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I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
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I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
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My country tears of thee.
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I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
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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Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace' One grand boulevard with trees with one grand cafe in sun with strong black coffee in very small cups. One not necessarily very beautiful man or woman who loves you. One fine day.
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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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.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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A lot of manuscripts that come in, you wonder by what outrageous fantasy the author believes that this should be pressed into print.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance for bullshit.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Anyone who saw Nagasaki would suddenly realize that they'd been kept in the dark by the United States government as to what atomic bombs can do.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
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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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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For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti