Beat Generation Quotes

We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels.

William Carlos Williams

I would rather go mad, gone down the dark road to Mexico, heroin dripping in my veins, eyes and ears full of marijuana, eating the god Peyote on the floor of a mudhut on the border or laying in a hotel room over the body of some suffering man or woman; rather jar my body down the road, crying by a diner in the Western sun; rather crawl on my naked belly over the tincans of Cincinnati; rather drag a rotten railroad tie to a Golgotha in the Rockies; rather, crowned with thorns in Galveston, nailed hand and foot in Los Angeles, raised up to die in Denver, pierced in the side in Chicago, perished and tombed in New Orleans and resurrected in 1958 somewhere on Garret Mountain, come down roaring in a blaze of hot cars and garbage, streetcorner Evangel in front of City I-Tall, surrounded by statues of agonized lions, with a mouthful of shit, and the hair rising on my scalp, screaming and dancing in praise of Eternity annihilating the sidewalk, annihilating reality, screaming and dancing against the orchestra in the destructible ballroom of the world, blood streaming from my belly and shoulders flooding the city with its hideous ecstasy, rolling over the pavements and highways by the bayoux and forests and derricks leaving my flesh and my bones hanging on the trees.

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

Democracy! Bah! When I hear that word I reach for my feather boa!

There are as many kinds of kisses as there are people on earth, as there are permutations and combinations of those people. No two people kiss alike—no two people fuck alike—but somehow the kiss is more personal, more individualized than the fuck.

For invented gods invariably disappoint those who worship them.

John Clellon Holmes

He had a third martini. He looked at me intently and took hold of my arm. 'Look', he said. 'You're a fish in a pond. It's drying up. You have to mutate into an amphibian, but someone keeps hanging on to you and telling you to stay in the pond, everything's going to be all right.

Maybe I should stop while I'm aheadNay, I swim with sea-demons no sweet summer tuned radioover my sunless desertscapehow does it burn without the sun?

Moonshine Noire

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody, much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to live for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear.Ho ho ho. Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters.

Hunter S. Thompson

Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back.

we met one strange summerin a regular tangle of sticky websyou had the air of angels sweet but I--drowned with the damned spiritsin lava oceans fearing your--foreign static frequency and grey-green eyes(I swear they are even if you--think otherwise): stormscalm ones, calmer than my--raging coals, empty and deadyou speak of souls like you believealways an optimist in pessimisticskin of ivory and titanium mesh...

Moonshine Noire

It’s a sort of furtiveness … Like we were a generation of furtive. You know, with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public’, a kind of beatness – I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are – and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world … It’s something like that. So I guess you might say we’re a beat generation.