Gregory Corso Quotes

Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power.

If you believe you're a poet, then you're saved.

I learned life were no dream I learned truth deceived Man is not God Life is a century Death an instant

Spirit is Life It flows thru the death of me endlessly like a river unafraid of becoming the sea

It is a great feeling to know that from a window I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves. And from these gather enough dream to sneak out a back door.

Ah, if I were dictator I'd have poets throwing bombs!

Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them.

I think of New York City lost in stars forgotten as a blue haired pet of childhood love Tonight the night is full;

Dante’s step into Hell will never be forgotten by Hell.

but if a girl were possible as I am possible then marriage would be possible...

was it man's love to screw the sky with monuments span the bay with orange and silver bridges shuttling structure into structure incorruptible in this endless tie each age impassions be it in stone or steel either in echo or halfheard ruin

If you have a choice of two things and can't decide, take both.

A woman from the audience asks: ‘Why were there so few women among the Beat writers?’ and [Gregory] Corso, suddenly utterly serious, leans forward and says: “There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the ’50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up.

Gregory [Corso] made lists of books for me to read, told me the best dictionary to own, encouraged and challenged me. Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were all my teachers, each one passing through the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel, my new university.

FOR MILES Your sound is faultless pure & round holy almost profound Your sound is your sound true & from within a confession soulful & lovely Poet whose sound is played lost or recorded but heard can you recall that 54 night at the Open Door when you & bird wailed five in the morning some wondrous yet unimaginable score?

Should I get married? Should I be good?

Power is not to be dropped from a plane

Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus For a rattle bag of broken Bach records Tack Della Francesca all over its crib Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

Around people if I feel I’m gonna die I excuse myself telling them “I gotta go!” “Go where?” they wanna know I don’t answer I just get outa there away from them because somehow they sense something wrong and never know what to do it scares them such suddenness How awful to just sit there and they asking: “Are you okay?” “Can we get you something?” “Want to lie down?” Ye gods! people! who wants to die amongst people?! Especially when they can’t do shit To the movies — to the movies that’s where I hurry to when I feel I’m going to die So far it’s worked.

Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates! All streaming into cozy hotels All going to do the same thing tonight The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen The lobby zombies they knowing what The whistling elevator man he knowing The winking bellboy knowing Everybody knowing! I'd be almost inclined not to do anything! Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye! Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon! running rampant into those almost climatic suites yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel! O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy a saint of divorce--

The Gates of Eden,” as he called it that night, took us furthest out into the realm of the imagination, to a point beyond logic and reason. Like “It’s Alright, Ma,” the song mentions a book title in its first line, but the song is more reminiscent of the poems of William Blake (and, perhaps, of Blake’s disciple Ginsberg) than it is of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, vaunting the truth that lies in surreal imagery. After an almost impenetrable first verse, the song approaches themes that were becoming familiar to Dylan’s listeners. In Genesis, Eden is the paradise where Adam and Eve had direct communication with God. According to “Gates of Eden,” it is where truth resides, without bewitching illusions. And the song is basically a list, verse after verse, of the corrosive illusions that Dylan would sing about constantly from the mid-1960s on: illusions about obedience to authority; about false religions and idols (the “utopian hermit monks” riding on the golden calf); about possessions and desire; about sexual repression and conformity (embodied by “the gray flannel dwarf”); about high-toned intellectualism. None of these count for much or even exist inside the gates of Eden. The kicker comes in the final verse, where the singer talks of his lover telling him of her dreams without any attempt at interpretation—and that at times, the singer thinks that the only truth is that there is no truth outside the gates of Eden. It’s a familiar conundrum: If there is no truth, isn’t saying as much really an illusion, too, unless we are all in Eden? (“All Cretans are liars,” says the Cretan.) What makes that one truth so special? But the point, as the lover knows, is that outside of paradise, interpretation is futile. Don’t try to figure out what the song, or what any work of art, “really” means; the meaning is in the imagery itself; attempting to define it is to succumb to the illusion that truth can be reached through human logic. So Dylan’s song told us, as he took the measure in his lyrics of what had begun as the “New Vision,” two and a half miles up Broadway from Lincoln Center at Columbia, in the mid-1940s. Apart from Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso may have been the only people in Philharmonic Hall who got it. I

Henry Hudson Screamed on the Half-Moon : "Police are a necessary evil !" I dreamed a cop, an old cop, a whitehaired cop bowed sad on a sofa knowing in his years he carried a gun a gun to stop the breath of a breathing being a gun to cause man to push up daisies forever - and when that realization mowed him down on the sofa - he wept to know man

Should I get married? Should I be good? Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood? —GREGORY CORSO, “Marriage

What’s poetry?” asked Kerouac. “Everything,” Gregory replied.

Il y avait des femmes, elles étaient là, je les connaissais, leurs familles les poussaient dans des institutions, elles on reçu des chocs électriques. Dans les années 50 si tu étais un homme tu pouvais être un rebelle, mais si tu étais une femme ta famille te bloquait. Il y eut certaines exceptions, je les connaissais, un jour quelqu'un écrira sur elles.

Faithless lyricists I have read They'd amputate a rose to know a rose - and patch it a clumsy detection

But police too must go to Heaven! That's why the boys are sad so sadly dancing so tiredly kissing God -

ইতিহাসের পলাতক সময়ের নিয়ন্ত্রক তুমি বোমা মারো ব্রহ্মাণ্ডের খেলনা সবথেকে দারুন ছিনিয়ে নেয়া আকাশ তোমাকে ঘেন্না করতে পারি না আমি কি বজ্জাত বিদ্যুৎ গাধার চোয়ালকে ঘেন্না করতে পারি যিশু জন্মের এক কোটি বছর আগের পাথরের চাঁই গদা লাঠি কুঠার গুলতি দা ভিঞ্চি রেডইনডিয়ান যুদ্ধকুঠার আপাচে-নেতার মশাল র‌্যাথবোনের ছোরা আহ আর দুঃখি বেপরোয়া বন্দুক ভেরলেম পুশকিন ডিলিঞ্জার বোগার্টের আহ সন্ত মাইকেলের কি জ্বলন্ত তরোয়াল ছিল না সন্ত জর্জের শূল ডেভিডের গুলতি বোমা তুমি ততোই নিষ্ঠুর যেমন তোমাকে মানুষ তৈরি করে তুমি ক্যানসারের চেয়ে নিষ্ঠুর নও সব মানুষই তোমাকে ঘেন্না করে তারা বরং গাড়ির ধাক্কায় বাজপড়ায় ডুবে মরতে চাইবে ছাদ থেকে পড়ে ইলেকট্রিক-চেয়ারে ঋডরোগে বুড়ো হয়ে হে বোমা তারা যেকোনো উপায়ে মরতে চাইবে কিন্তু তুমি মৃত্যুর আঙুল স্বাধীনকর্মী তুমি ফাটো বা না ফাটো তা মানুষের ব্যাপার নয় মৃত্যু বহুকাল যাবৎ আমাদের বিপর্যস্ত করেছে