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: The Restored Text

“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

“I am all men and so I am
Fully implicated in all men’s crimes.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“We, too, are beings
Loitering until dispatched—
The eggs of ghosts
Waiting to hatch.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Time is relative, so
There’s no time left to live.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“All brace to taste life’s bitter curse—
A second birth, but in reverse—
A return to the cold, hard womb of earth.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Dove-white dawn illumes life’s worth
As mourners load crow-black hearse
To feed remains to hungry dirt.
From nothing to nothing, from dust to dust.
Life delays, then betrays;
It is death alone that we can trust.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Craving immortality, my mind masters fraud:
My spirit’s projected as my brain cells applaud.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Man, thou art lust and unto lust
Thou has returned.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[I]t is said,
“Patience is a virtue.”
But I know, instead,
Patience is a vulture,
Made up of time,
Picking at my spine.
Pick, tick...
Pick, tick...
Pick, tick...
Die.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“I am a criminal for just existing
When I know that any crime
Is being committed anywhere—
Not crimes against law,
But real crimes against
JUSTICE, PEACE, LIFE.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[W]hat we think is real is only
a mind virus of synthetic words, quite empty,
and ready to fall like a house of cards
at the slightest provocation,
the slightest exploration.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Possessions are the weights on our chains,
designating us indentured servants in this game,
as time-saving devices erase time all the same—”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“Smoking factories are the only real life here.
Living human corpses form their precious fuel—
fools ruled by more greedy, more ruthless fools.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[W]e ourselves are
the skeletons who scare us,
faux grownups who could never care for us,
left alone to watch in terror as all life is extinguished again.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[T]he fine line between life and death, we finally find, is no line at all.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“tick... tock... tick... tock…
this mocking by clocks
never stops,
until it does—
and then we rot.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“And, so, the poet who sees deepest
Is rooted out quickest—before he can
Infect the masses with his utopian visions,
Slay their despair, ease their burdens,
Restore their hopes, unleash their dreams.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“The poet floats above—
Stateless, ageless, timeless, guileless—
A creator of beauty,
An excavator of truth,
A healer of fear,
A harbinger of love.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“[T]errorism is a godsend to the State,
Allowing it to follow its natural tendency
To move away from democracy.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“at the end of the tunnel—
not light, just night.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave

“I was about to be swallowed
By my mother's womb—
Where I might enjoy again
The perfect solitude of death.”
― Rick Klaus Theis, Lorca's Grave