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Beat Generation Quotes

Browse 61 quotes about Beat Generation.

Beat Generation Quotes

“we met one strange summer in a regular tangle of sticky webs you had the air of angels sweet but I-- drowned with the damned spirits in lava oceans fearing your-- foreign static frequency and grey-green eyes (I swear they are even if you-- think otherwise): storms calm ones, calmer than my-- raging coals, empty and dead you speak of souls like you believe always an optimist in pessimistic skin of ivory and titanium mesh...”

LoveFaithSilenceBeautySeaRegretSorrowDepressionCalmRageEyesDeadOptimistAngelsDemonsHollowDrowningNihilismPessimistSoulsPoetry LoveSummertimeLove LetterOne SidedStar Crossed LoversOceansBeat GenerationSummer LoveBeat Poetry
Author:Moonshine Noire
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“আমার বিছানা হলুদ রঙে ঢাকা আমার বিছানা হলুদ রঙে ঢাকা -- হে সূর্য, আমি তোমার ওপরে বসি ওহ সোনালি ক্ষেত তোমার ওপরে শুই ওহ টাকাকড়ি তোমাব স্বপ্নে দেখি আরও, আরও, কেঁদে ওঠে বিছানা -- আমার সঙ্গে বেশি কথা বলো-- ওহ বিছানা পৃথিবীর ভার নিয়েছে তোমার ওপরে রাখা সব হারিয়ে যাওয়া স্বপ্ন ওহ বিছানা যার চুল গজায় না, যার সঙ্গে সঙ্গম করা যায় না কিংবা যে সঙ্গম করতে পারে না ওহ বিছানা সব যুগের খাবারের গুঁড়ো তোমার ওপরে জড়ো করা হে হলুদ রঙের বিছানা সূর্যের দিকে কুচকাওয়াজ করে যাও যেখানে তোমার যাত্রা ফুরোবে ওহ ৫০ পাউণ্ডের বিছানা যে ৪০০ পাউণ্ডের বেশি নিতে পারে কতো শক্তিমান তুমি হে বিছানা, কেবল মানুষের জন্য আর জান্তুদের জন্য নয় হল;উদ বিছানা কবে জন্তুরা সমান অধিকার পাবে ? ওহ চারপেয়ে বিছানা মেঝের ওপরে চিরকালের জন্য তৈরি ওহে হলুদ বিছানা জগতের সমস্ত খবর তোমার ওপরে কখনও না কখনও শোয় ১৯৫৭, প্যারিস”

Inspirational LifeGay RomanceBeat Generation
Book:Clean Asshole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs
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“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.”

LifePoetryMadnessDrugsBeat Generation
Author:Allen Ginsberg
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“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.”

CountryFearFreedomValueUsaWriterStateBeat Generation
Book:Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century
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“And there's my poor endeavoring human desk at which I sit so often during the day, facing south, the papers and pencils and the coffee cup with sprigs of alpine fir and a weird orchid of the heights wiltable in one day– My Beechnut gum, my tobacco pouch, dusts, pitiful pulp magazines I have to read, view south to all those snowy majesties– The waiting is long. On Starvation Ridge little sticks Are trying to grow.”

LonelinessCoffeeWriters LifeJournalingOrchidsBeat GenerationBeatnikMountaintopWriters Room
Book:Desolation Angels
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“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?”

WritingJazzWriting PhilosophyWriting InspirationBeat GenerationJazz AgeBeat PoetryJazz Age Stories
Book:Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
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“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.”

PhilosophyBeat GenerationJack KerouacOn The RoadBeat Poetry
Book:Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe
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“The Beats and the Pranksters showed us different ways of opting out of society. They were both the personification of countercultural movements. The Beats were trying to change literature, and the Pranksters were trying to change the people and the country. Kesey, in fact, was his own cultural revolution, striving to keep the upbeat, freedom-loving spirit of America alive.”

Beat GenerationPrankstersBeat PoetryKen Kesey
Book:Lord of Publishing: A Memoir
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“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.”

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Book:Woes of the True Policeman
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“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.”

WestSpiritual GrowthDriveBeat GenerationRoadtripVisionary Metaphysics
Book:Drive Through the Night
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“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).”

SufismHippieFree SpiritBeat GenerationHakim BeyPeter Lamborn WilsonGreen KnightQalandar
Book:Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam
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“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.”

MemoirBeat GenerationWilliam S Burroughs
Book:Just Kids
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“I have a real soft spot for flying saucer songs and Frenkenstein songs. When I was a kid the first record I ever really liked was called "The Mummy", and the flip-side was called "The Beat Generation" which Richard Hell later re-wrote as "The Blank Generation". I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I didn't like Elvis much then, but I was very young. When I was a kid I used to play that monster all the time!”

FirstsRealPlayKidsYoungUsedSongSidesHellRecordsGenerationsHeardBeatsMonstersFlyingSpotsBlankFlipMummyFlying SaucersBeat Generation
Author:Tom Verlaine
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“the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

PeopleInspirationalPassionLiteratureStarsFriendsHorseMadSavedMental IllnessBe KindYellowCandleFabulousSpidersHippieCommonplaceFreethinkerSuitcasesExplodingFavorite BookLife AlteringBeat GenerationYawningBeatnikHippiBest LiteratureCowgirls
Author:Jack Kerouac
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“The bartenders are the regular band of Jack, and the heavenly drummer who looks up to the sky with blue eyes, with a beard, is wailing beer-caps of bottles and jamming on the cash register and everything is going to the beat - It's the beat generation, its béat, it's the beat to keep, it's the beat of the heart, it's being beat and down in the world and like oldtime lowdown.”

WorldLooksHeartEyeGenerationsSkyBandBeatsBlueBeerLook UpHeavenlyBottlesCashBeardCapsDrummerRegisterBlue EyesBartenderWailingBeat Generation
Book:Desolation Angels
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“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.”

KnowsWorldKindMeanUseMightFormLevelsGenerationsBeatsConventionsWearinessBeat GenerationFlaunting
Author:Jack Kerouac
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