Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregory Corso

Corso drops his origin story like a piece of street reportage, refusing the softened, literary version that would make it more palatable. “I moved up over Lower East Side” isn’t just geography; it’s social altitude measured in blocks, the kind of New York detail that codes class, roughness, and survival. The sentence runs on the way a kid’s life runs on: no neat chapters, no tidy causality, just a chain of placements and displacements.

The phrase “adopted by eight foster parents” lands with a cold, bureaucratic irony. “Adopted” is supposed to mean chosen, claimed, secured. Coupled with “eight foster parents,” it becomes almost anti-adoption: a serial custody arrangement that reads less like belonging than being passed along. Corso’s offhand “man” is doing real work, too. It pulls the listener close, making the testimony casual enough to be bearable, while also signaling the Beat-era posture of intimacy and defiance. He’s not performing trauma for sympathy; he’s asserting it as credential.

Context matters: this is the Lower East Side ecosystem that fed Beat writing, where the city is both muse and machine, and childhood instability becomes an education in impermanence. By ending on “till I was about ten years old,” Corso makes the number sound approximate, as if even time itself couldn’t be fully owned. The subtext is a theory of the self: identity formed not through roots, but through motion, interruption, and the hard improvisation of getting through New York.