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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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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
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Various
Soapbox
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Subversive
Poet
Relish
Danger
Plato
Roles
Promote
Present
Poets
Use
Republic
Ideas
Considered
Gadflies
More quotes by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.
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
Almost every truly creative being alienated & expatriated in his own country
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I didn’t know that painters and writers retired. They’re like soldiers – they just fade away.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in a new rebirth of wonder.
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
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
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Make your mind learn its way around the heart.
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
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
There is an ecstatic mechanism in birds that makes them fly upwards in spite of worms.
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
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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
I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.
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
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
As I get older I perceive Life has its tail in its mouth.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
