Allen Ginsberg Quotes

There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.

Sometimes, only one person is missing, and the whole world seems depopulated.

Those who have no hope pass their old age shrouded with an inward gloom.

Together, we looked down at the tiny house, the sole thing on this vast, flat surface. Like the only person living on the moon. It could be either lonely or peaceful, depending on how you looked at it. "It's a start," I said.

The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

Sonnet XXV Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own: I wavered through the streets, among Objects: Nothing mattered or had a name: The world was made of air, which waited. I knew rooms full of ashes, Tunnels where the moon lived, Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost', Questions that insisted in the sand. Everything was empty, dead, mute, Fallen abandoned, and decayed: Inconceivably alien, it all Belonged to someone else - to no one: Till your beauty and your poverty Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.

The arctic loneliness of age.

For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

I have always had plenty of friends, and now at age sixty, I face four walls as a common prisoner.

There was a patient look on the old man's face, as if the world were a great mistake and he had nobody with whom to speak his own language or find companionship.

Moose had no friends that year. A lot of the time a moose would feel tired and lean against other moose. Only there wouldn't be moose there and the moose would fall.

In some way impossible to ascertain, after so many years of absense, Jose Arcadio was still an autumnal child, terribly sad and solitary.

The memory of Cumshewa is of a great lonesomeness smothered in a blur of rain.

In the middle of the woods Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo. Two old chairs and half a candle, One old jug without a handle- These were all the worldly goods.

My name is Jared Howe. I haven't spoken to another human being in more than two years, so I'm sure I must seem...a little crazy to you.

His own life seemed so solitary, a fragile column supporting nothing amidst the wreckage of the years.

The moon, our own, earthly moon is bitterly lonely, because it is alone in the sky, always alone, and there is no one to turn to, no one to turn to it. All it can do is ache across the weightless airy ice, across thousands of versts, toward those who are equally lonely on earth, and listen to the endless howling of dogs. (“A Story About The Most Important Thing”)

Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars.

The great renunciation of old age as it prepared for death, wraps itself up in its chrysalis, which may be observed at the end of lives that are at all prolonged, even in old lovers who have lived for one another, in old friends bound by the closest ties of mutual sympathy, who, after a certain year, cease to make the necessary journey or even to cross the street to see one another, cease to correspond, and know that they will communicate no more in this world.

Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

He looked very old. He looked, James thought, getting his head now against the Lighthouse, now against the waste of waters running away into the open, like some old stone lying on the sand; he looked as if he had become physically what was always at the back of both of their minds-that loneliness which was for both of them the truth about things.

He's stuck at 3:14 a.m. with only the moon to talk to.

The Moon and Pleiades have set, / Midnight is nigh, / The time is passing, passing, yet / Alone I lie.

It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.