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Art
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Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Attachment
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America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Democracy
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Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather Boa!
-Allen Ginsberg
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Dreams
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I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.
I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.
-Allen Ginsberg, An Eastern Ballad
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Drugs
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Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine,
jiggling your knees blankly in the rain.
When it snows in your nose
you catch cold in your brain.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Marijuana is a useful catalyst for specific optical and aural aesthetic perceptions. I apprehended the structure of certain pieces of jazz and classical music in a new manner under the influence of marijuana, and these apprehensions have remained valid in years of normal consciousness.
-Allen Ginsberg, The Great Marijuana Hoax: The First Manifesto to End the Bringdown
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No monster vibration, no snake universe hallucinations. Many tiny jeweled violet flowers along the path of a living brook that looked like Blake's illustration for a canal in grassy Eden: huge Pacific watery shore, Orlovsky dancing naked like Shiva long-haired before giant green waves, titanic cliffs that Wordsworth mentioned in his own Sublime, great yellow sun veiled with mist hanging over the planet's oceanic horizon. No harm.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Goodness
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Affection is the most important thing. And the quality of affection - with your friends, your lovers, your family. But particularly for your own generation.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Love
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The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Madness
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I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.
-Allen Ginsberg, Howl
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Media
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Whoever controls the media
-Allen Ginsberg
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Mental Illness
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So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic'.
-Allen Ginsberg
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News
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I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Poetry
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The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That's what poetry does.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
-Allen Ginsberg
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I have a new method of poetry. All you got to do is look over your notebooks... or lay down on a couch, and think of anything that comes into your head, especially the miseries. Then arrange in lines of two, three or four words each, don't bother about sentences, in sections of two, three or four lines each.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Sadness
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It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Sight
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When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.
-Allen Ginsberg
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Students
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My own experience is that a certain kind of genius among students is best brought out in bed.
-Allen Ginsberg
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War
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What if somebody gave a war and
Nobody came?
Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and
Forever be Itself again.
-Allen Ginsberg, Graffiti, 1972
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Books by and about Allen Ginsberg