Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Kind
Various
Soapbox
Role
Subversive
Poet
Relish
Danger
Plato
Roles
Promote
Present
Poets
Use
Republic
Ideas
Considered
Gadflies
More quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
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
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
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
The real literary editors have mostly been fired. Those that remain are all 'bottom line' editors everything depends on the money.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
They were looking for a stable, but we didn't have one. In fact, we weren't very stable ourselves.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalytpic times, even if this means sounding apocaltypic.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
I have a feeling I'm falling on rare occasions but most of the time I have my feet on the ground I can't help it if the ground itself is falling.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
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
