Allen Ginsberg America Quotations

America, how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

I am neither romantic nor a visionary, and that is my weakness and perhaps my power; at any rate it is one difference. In less romantic and visionary terms, I am a Jew, (with powers of introspection and eclecticism attendant, perhaps.) But I am alien to your natural grace, to the spirit which you would know as a participator in America.

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.

Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

Nobody saves America by sniffing cocaine. Jiggling your knees blankeyed in the rain, when it snows in your nose you catch cold in your brain.

The real America that Whitman proclaimed and Thoreau decoded.

America, why are your libraries full of tears?

Every American wants MORE & MORE of the world and why not, you only live once. But the mistake made in America is persons accumulate more & more dead matter, machinery, possessions & rugs & fact information at the expense of what really counts as more: feeling, good feeling, sex feeling, tenderness feeling, mutual feeling. You own twice as much rug if you're twice as aware of the rug.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

America, I've given you all and now I'm nothing.