Literature Beat Generation

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

- Allen Ginsberg

I really believe, or want to believe, really I am nuts, otherwise I'll never be sane.

- Allen Ginsberg

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.

- Allen Ginsberg

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

- Allen Ginsberg

...who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demaning instantaneous lobotomy, and who instead received the concrete void of insulin metrazol hydrotherapy electicity therapy occupational therapy pingpong and amnesia...

- Allen Ginsberg

...angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

- Allen Ginsberg

Dylan is about the individual against creation. Beethoven is about one man's fist in the lightining clouds, Allen Ginsburg is about a confused mind writing down newspaper headlines from Mars!

- Allen Ginsburg- "is about" ( $ ) ( ? )

A reading is a kind of communion. The poet articulates the semi-known for the tribe.

- Gary Snyder

Common Sense, Common Law, commom tenderness & common tranquility, our means in Americato control the money munching war machine, bright lit industry everywhere digesting forests & excreting soft pyramids of newsprint...burping Napalm on palm rice tropic greenery.

- Ginsberg

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved

- Gregory Corso

Sure I'm old, and I'm evil, and I'm ugly, and I'm tired. But that isn't it. I've been this way for ten years, and I'm all down the main line.

- Herbert Huncke

Sure I'm old, and I'm evil, and I'm ugly, and I'm tired. But that isn't it. I've been this way for ten years, and I'm all down the main line.

- Herbert Huncke

Many ,many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now . Happily some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them-if you want to . Just as someday if you have something to offer , someone will learn something from you . And it isn't education . It's history . It's poetry.

- J.D Salinger

We should be wondering tonight, "Is there a world?" But I could go and talk on 5, 10, 20 minutes about is there a world, because there is really no world, cause sometimes I'm walkin’ on the ground and I see right through the ground. And there is no world. And you'll find out.

- Jack Kerouac

I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Ecstacy, even, I felt, with flashes of sudden remembrance, and feeling sweaty and drowsy I felt like sleeping and dreaming in the grass.

- Jack Kerouac

...and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, it be-at, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown and like in ancient civilizations the slave boatmen rowing galleys to a beat and servants spinning pottery to a beat...

- Jack Kerouac

But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

- Jack Kerouac

"Literature is no longer Necessary Teaching is left..

- Jack Kerouac

There's your Karma ripe as peaches.

- Jack Kerouac

My witness is the empty sky.

- Jack Kerouac

...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...

- Jack Kerouac

Mankind is like dogs, not gods--as long as you dont get mad they'll bite you--but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs dont respect humility & sorrow.

- Jack Kerouac

You never die enough to cry

- Jack Kerouac

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes "AWWW!"

- Jack Kerouac

The charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power.

- Jack Kerouac

We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.

- Jack Kerouac

I loved the way she said "LA"; I love the way everybody says "LA" on the Coast; it's their one and only golden town when all is said and done.

- Jack Kerouac

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

- Jack Kerouac

"A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be." IT'S ALL OVER

- Jack Kerouac

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

- Jack Kerouac

New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets.

- Jack Kerouac

My manners, abominable at times, can be sweet. As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind. I'm a wretch. But I love, love.

- Jack Kerouac, "Satori in Paris" ( $ ) ( ? )

Throw my thoughts into the breeze one last time and watch them float away in waves of relief. Tomorrow...... I shall never think again for the burden is too much to bear.

- Jamie Stem

The bottoms of my shoes are clean from walking in the rain

- Kerouac

God is not outside us but is just us, the living and the dead, the never-lived and never-died. That we should learn it only now, is supreme reality, it was written a long time ago in the archives of universal mind, it is already done, there's no more to do.

- Kerouac

Where doth go, America, in thy shiny car in the night?

- Kerouac

Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth and was humbly and sincerly putting on paper that which he saw and experienced and loved and lost; what his passing thoughts were and his sorrows and desires.

- Neal Cassady

To rebel! That is the immediate objective of poets! We can not wait and will not be held back...The "poetic marvelous" and the unconscious are the true inspirers of rebels and poets

- Philip Lamantia

In wildness is the preservation of the world

- Thoreau

there are no differences, but differences of degree,between degrees of difference and no difference.

- William Henry James

Jeder macht eine kleine Dummheit (everyone makes a little dumbness)

- William S. Burroughs

I'm running out of everything now. Out of veins, out of money.

- William S. Burroughs

"The only possible ETHIC is to do what one wants to do."

- William S. Burroughs

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

- William S. Burroughs

Language is a virus.

- William S. Burroughs

In the U.S., you have to be a deviant or die or boredom.

- William S. Burroughs

Madness is confusion of levels of fact...Madness is not seeing visions but confusing levels.

- William S. Burroughs

trip your psyche to the bare bones of spontaneous process, and you give yourself one chance in a thousand to make the Pass.

- William S. Burroughs