Beatnik Quotes

“If you're too open-minded; your brains will fall out.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.”
― Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another til I drop.”
― Jack Kerouac

“[in the true mad north] of introspection,
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die, glimpsing in their
dying fall, all life's memory of existence.”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind

“Will be but corpses dressed in frocks,
who cannot speak to birds or rocks.”
― Gary Snyder

“Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee.”
― Harry Whitewolf, Route Number 11: Argentina, Angels & Alcohol

“The dream is already ended and we're already awake in the golden eternity.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.”
― Charles de Lint, Dharma

“What's Your Road, Man?”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”
― Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems

“They're auras, Davey. I see them, too. The longer you stare at them, the wider the energy field expands until more colors begin to show themselves.”
― Christina Westover, The Man Who Followed Jack Kerouac

“I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”
― Allen Ginsberg

“I have tonight begun reading a stupid, shitty book by Kerouac called Big Sur, and I would give a ball to wake up tomorrow on some empty ridge with a herd of beatniks grazing in the clearing about 200 yards below the house. And then to squat with the big boomer and feel it on my shoulder with the smell of grease and powder and, later, a little blood.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“..giving power to negative thoughts or fears was bringing ideas to life in physical world,idea in mind became emotion in heart,emotion turned into words spoken,written,painted,strummed across guitar strings,or vibrantly held note by Tibetan singing bowl, thoughts affected physical world.”
― Christina Westover, The Man Who Followed Jack Kerouac

“Twentyone is too old to go anywhere alone, you know that. I want to go with someone. I don't mean as a bride, I'm not so gauche as that, but as a mistress or paramour or concubine or companion or friend or pal or anything else. I just don't want to be left alone! I want to get out of here!" She said it again for all the wide-faced flowers to hear: "I want to get out of here!”
― Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

“Shared emotions experienced by two souls,empathy on unequivocal level which Davey believed would change entire species of mankind if only secret of empathy could be telepathically shared with humanity,one soul after another, until every soul understood true meaning of love.”
― Christina Westover, The Man Who Followed Jack Kerouac

“The original Hippies were cool because it was who they were. But the ‘movement’ grew in numbers because it became the 'in thing’ to do. And sad as it is, most of them were plastic Hippies. The original Beatniks did what they did not because they were ‘hip’ but because it was who they were as a person. These were Carefree Scamps, but the plastic Hippies weren’t carefree at all

And besides that, they smelled like an Oxfam shop”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“..home INSIDE is home shining brightly above all homes in physical world.”
― Christina Westover, The Man Who Followed Jack Kerouac

“Paradise!' he screamed. 'The one and only indispensable Paradise.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“The problem with the 11:11 Phenomenon is getting anybody interested in it that hasn't experienced it themselves. Other phenomena, such as U.F.Os or crop circles, are able to be seen. We can debate them. But seeing and being guided by 11:11 is hard to convey to those uninitiated in its ways.”
― Harry Whitewolf, Route Number 11: Argentina, Angels & Alcohol

“Lured by smooth roads onto a new turnpike, he read with surprise the rules he was handed, don't stop, don't turn around, pay when you get there; he made his escape at the first exit he saw, for fiftyfive cents, and now he was on the old road buzzing the staid turnpike by turns over and under, teasing it crazy.”
― Douglas Woolf, Wall to Wall

“Il pouvait à peine placer un mot tellement ça l'excitait de vivre.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“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.”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

“There ain’t no such thing as lumberjack, that must be a Back East expression. Up here we call ‘em loggers.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“Defining moment in new telepathist's life, moment when intuitive individual learns most of society isn't telepathic, doesn't see auras,doesn't know what life on ethereal astral plane is like.”
― Christina Westover, The Man Who Followed Jack Kerouac

“Adrift in the endless night,
I’ve wished on the stars far-flung
not knowing each spec of light
was the dust of my own dreams
shattered in another life
—embedded in the horizon
in the blast wave that shattered me
into the mosaic of a
melancholic,
alcoholic
dreamer
drunk
on this insatiable yearning
to connect with another
because I can’t find myself.”
― L.M. Browning, Drive Through the Night