Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Howl and Other Poems:
“We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter”
“Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's an angel!”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, ”
“Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman isholy as you my soul are holy!The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice isholy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holyKerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cas-sady holy the unknown buggered and sufferingbeggars holy the hideous human angels!Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocksof the grandfathers of Kansas!Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bopapocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuanahipsters peace & junk & drums!Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holythe cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy themysterious rivers of tears under the streets!Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of themiddle class! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebell-ion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria &Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy MoscowHoly Istanbul!Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy theclocks in space holy the fourth dimension holythe fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy thelocomotive holy the visions holy the hallucina-tions holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy theabyss!Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours!bodies! suffering! magnanimity!Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligentkindness of the soul!”
“I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.”
“The weight of the worldis love.Under the burdenof solitude,under the burdenof dissatisfactionthe weight,the weight we carryis love.Who can deny?In dreamsit touchesthe body,in thoughtconstructsa miracle,in imaginationanguishestill bornin human—looks out of the heartburning with purity—for the burden of lifeis love,but we carry the weightwearily,and so must restin the arms of loveat last,must rest in the armsof love.No restwithout love,no sleepwithout dreamsof love—be mad or chillobsessed with angelsor machines,the final wishis love—cannot be bitter,cannot deny,cannot withholdif denied:the weight is too heavy—must givefor no returnas thoughtis givenin solitudein all the excellenceof its excess.The warm bodiesshine togetherin the darkness,the hand movesto the centerof the flesh,the skin tremblesin happinessand the soul comesjoyful to the eye—yes, yes,that's whatI wanted,I always wanted,I always wanted,to returnto the bodywhere I was born.”
“What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?- Howl”
“Follow your inner moonlight, don’t hide the madness.”
“What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?”
“My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven't disappeared, time's left its remnants and qualities for me to use -- my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.”
“I'm with you in Rocklandin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.”
“Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river! Dreams! adorations! illumnations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!”
“No rest without love,No sleepwithout dreamsof love -be mad or chillobsessed with angelsor machinesthe final wishis love.”
“Who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Spacethrough images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame”
“The closet door is open for me, where I left it, since I left it open, it has graciously stayed open.”
“Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!”
“I want people to bow as they see me and say he is gifted with poetry, he has seen the presence of the creator. ”
“All these books are published in Heaven.”
“No rest without love, no sleep without dreams of love- be mad or chill obsessed with angels or machines, the final wish is love -cannot be bitter, cannot deny,cannot withhold if denied: the weight is too heavy”
“You too must seek the sun...”
“Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”
“He saw that I was shy, and at the time I was still scared of feeling with another person, so he put his arm around me and pulled me and put my head on his breast and gave me love actually.”
“We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessedby our own seed & hairy nakedaccomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.”
“I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.”
“I had a moment of clarity, saw the feeling in the heart of things, walked out to the garden crying.”
“..who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, and alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse and the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion and the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising and the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality..”
“What is obscenity? And to whom?”
“The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!”
“Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.”
“I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?What price bananas? Are you my Angel?”
