Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Wheels
Doors
Poets
Higher
Closed
Open
Worlds
Public
Carry
Holed
Come
Window
Transport
Long
Places
Closets
World
Poet
Windows

More quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Image
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
Image
The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
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
Image
If you're too open-minded your brains will fall out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
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
Image
I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors everything depends on the money.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
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
Image
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say 'whom I am constantly shocking
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Image
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