Beat Generation Quotes

“The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“Exterminate all rational thought”
― William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time...”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch

“I do not wish to escape to myself, I wish to escape from myself. I wish to obliterate my consciousness and my knowledge of independent existence, my guilts, my secretiveness.”
― Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

“I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth...

without taxes”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“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.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Now you're going East with Sal," Galatea said, "and what do you think you're going to accomplish by that? Camille has to stay home and mind the baby now you're gone--how can she keep her job? and she never wants to see you again and I don't blame her. If you see Ed along the road you tell him to come back to me or I'll kill him."

Just as flat as that. It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in a pitiful dream. Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT--the root, the soul of Beatific.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“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.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“Does kittykat know there's a pigeon on the clothes closet?”
― Jack Kerouac, Tristessa

“It really was a whole generation who were listening to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, James Moody, Fats Navarro and, a little bit later on, Mongo Santamaría and Chuck Berry, and these dozen or so guys gave them a voice. They led the way. They wrote what a whole generation wanted to read. The time was right and they seized the day by writing about their lives. They travelled, they got into scrapes, they got arrested, they got wasted … and they wrote about it.

Isn’t that something?”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“We’ve all got a dozen or so friends, haven’t we? And when we’re drunk we philosophise well into the night on an array of subjects ranging from what happened before the Big Bang to who would win a fight between a vampire and zombie, to what’s the most compromising position to be caught in, but we’re hardly going to be extolled in 60 or 70 years’ time as the Heat Generation or the Cheat Generation or the Street Generation, are we?

The Tweet Generation, maybe, but that’s about all.

So what was it about these few guys? Well, they wrote about what they did, and what they did was quite revolutionary back then. They went On the Road, and it was Jack Kerouac’s book that turned the tide.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Balanceándose y rodando en la banca de la
soledad de medianoche reinos dolmen del amor,
sueño de la vida de una pesadilla, cuerpos
convertidos en piedra tan pesada como la
luna”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl

“I've figured out a whole philosophy on the idea of waste as evil and creation as good. So long as you are creating something it is good. The only sin is waste of your potentialities... ...[Lifebuoy soap ads are] what you call wasteful creation. It's all dichotomized. Then there's creative waste, such as talking to you now.”
― William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

“I’m a spiritual mutt. The road is my church. It was on the road that I discovered the landscape god. My journals tell of the perpetual midnight mass held on the highways and byways of the American West. Every so often, climbing out of the driver’s seat with a journal and a camera, seeking the sacrament of the wild silence found in the unsullied sanctuaries of intact wilderness.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night

“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, The Gates of Wrath: Rhymed Poems, 1948-1952

“I am not not an I, secret wick, I do nothing, light myself, burn.”
― Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

“Spiraling in hollowed caves of skin-stretched me, totally doorless,

Emptied of vital parts, previously evicted finally
by landlord mind

To make nerve-lined living space, needed desperately by my transient, sightless, sleepless,
Soul.”
― Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

“Digging among reddened lipstained cups,
Of leftover sadness,
Hopelessly hoping hopefully
To find love
Of a dead moon
Or a poem.”
― Bob Kaufman

“My face is covered with maps of dead nations”
― Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

“Kenneth Wood was sitting on the windowsill looking at him sardonically, yet with that sadness that always happened when they looked at each other - as though there was something they knew that nobody else knew, a crazy sorrowful knowledge of themselves in the middle of the pitiable world.”
― jack kerouac, The Town and the City

“The price of civilization is repression. The only part of it the Beats reject is the bill.”
― Peter Simple, Way of the World: The Best of Peter Simple

“Bernard adds: “Remember Nietzsche? That we must use culture to overcome the death of god and defeat Nihilism? Well, we just did that via a Beatnik style poetry reading. Remember friends, we must defeat Nihilism a day at a time. Down with Nihilism! Cheers to that!”
― Ryan Gelpke, Nietzsche’s Birthday Party: A Short Story Collection

“Like so many American tales, On the Road is about escape about lighting out for the perpetually receding territory ahead.”
― William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady

“Like so many American tales, On the Road is about escape, about lighting out for the perpetually receding territory ahead.”
― William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady

“The Church is becoming alarmed by the number of people defecting to God.”
― Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

“(So much laughter, concealed by blood and faith;
Life is a saxophone played by death.)

Greedy to please, we learned to cry;
Hungry to live, we learned to die.
The heart is a sad musician,
Forever playing the blues.”
― Bob Kaufman, Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

“If modern dervishes are no more than
"traditional hippies," still I feel that the world has a secret but absolute need for the presence of such wild free spirits, just as it needs the presence of some wilderness, unplanned, unmanaged, apparently profitless, chaotic as God first made it. (And both of these needs seem to fall under the patronage of the master traveler, Khezr himself).”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“It is always morning, the caravan is always departing. All we can do is share the Prophet's prayer - "O Lord increase our amazement" - and set forth into the Bewilderness.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

“He said that some nights he heard the tom-tom beat of his passion, but he didn't know for sure whether it was really the beat of his passion or of his youth slipping through his fingers, maybe, he added, it's just the beat of poetry, the beat that comes to us all without exception at some mysterious hour, easily missed but absolutely free.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman