Life & Wisdom Quote by Gregory Corso

Corso takes the most irritating pronoun in the English language - that evasive, blame-friendly "they" - and turns it into a confession. The opening cadence feels like someone arguing with a heckler only he can hear: "They... they've knocked me down but I got up". It’s classic outsider rhetoric, the kind that lets you survive a hostile world by narrating it as persecution. Then he undercuts it. The line break logic is streetwise and philosophical at once: "I always get up" sounds like grit; "quite often I took the fall" admits complicity. The swagger collapses into self-implication.

"Nothing moves a mountain but itself" is the hinge. It’s a proverb with Beat-era fingerprints: spiritual self-reliance dressed in plain talk, a refusal to hand your fate to institutions or enemies or even luck. But it also carries a darker idea: if the mountain can only be moved by itself, you’re stuck with your own mass, your own habits, your own gravity. The poem’s emotional trick is to start in grievance and end in accountability without ever sounding pious.

The final turn - "I've long ago named them me" - reframes "they" as a psychological defense mechanism, not a real antagonist. In the context of Corso’s life (orphaned, jailed young, forged in the Beat scene’s mix of bravado and self-destruction), the line reads like hard-earned sobriety: the enemy isn’t society, not really. Society is just the stage; the real sabotage is internal. It’s survival literature that refuses the comfort of a villain.