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Portrait of Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

(1926–1997) Autobiographer United States

290 quotes in 1035 categories

Allen Ginsberg was an autobiographer from the United States, best known for Howl.

Quick Facts About Allen Ginsberg

Born: June 3, 1926
Died: April 5, 1997
Nationality: United States
Profession: Autobiographer
Notable works: Howl
Known for: Kaddish, The Fall of America: Poems of These States, Howl

About Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he befriended Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.

Biography source: Wikipedia

Awards & Honors

John Jay Award Golden Wreath National Book Award Robert Frost Medal Guggenheim Fellowship National Book Award for Poetry

Quotes by Allen Ginsberg · Page 12

“We talk about our assholes. We talk about our cocks. We talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re gonna…

Last night

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“So I dream nightly of an embarcation, captains, captains, iron passageways, cabin lights, Brooklyn across the waters, the great dull boat, visitors,…

Dreams

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Let the straight flower bespeak its purpose in straightness - to seek the light. Let the crooked flower bespeak its purpose in…

Crooked

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We are all exposed to the flash bulb of death.

Bulbs

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“The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand…

Spirituality

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“No rest without love, No sleep without dreams of love - be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines the final…

Computers

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I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world,…

Advancing

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“Television concentrates its blue flicker of death in the frontal lobe”

Death

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We love to be hurt and we love to have our unhealing wounds opened and reopened again: we sit staring in the…

Art

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“Absolutes are Coercion. Change is absolute.”

Absolutes

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I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.

Clarity

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“with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and endless balls”

Dreams

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I learned a world from each / one whom I loved

Learning

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“washing terror-waves round earth-globe back to suburb TV home night kitchens”

Friday-the-thirteenth

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“And I in a concrete room above the abandoned labyrinth of Palenque measuring my fate, wandering solitary in the wild --blinking singleminded…

Destiny

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Allen Ginsberg by topic

Poetry (23) Love (23) World (16) Time (16) Dreams (15) Writing (14) America (14) Psychology (13) Spirituality (12) Want (11) Inspirational (11) People (10) Friday-the-thirteenth (10) Autumn-gold-new-england-fall (10) Philosophy of Mind (9)