Beat Generation Quotes

O death where is thy sting? The man is never on time.

The beat generation (coined in Playboy)

I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys

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!

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.

Like many nonconformist and beat generation writers, William S. Burroughs takes the outcasts of society as his theme.

The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on.

Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw.

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.

They were like the man with the dungeon stone and gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining.

I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future.

My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.

He had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.

Because the only people for me are the mad ones.

Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all?

Maybe that's what life is... a wink of the eye and winking stars.

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.

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

I hope it is true that a man can die and yet not only live in others but give them life, and not only life, but that great consciousness of life.

John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!'

The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked.

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.

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.

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind'll blow it back.

Woe to those who spit on the beat generation, the wind will blow it back.

Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness.