Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The gag lands because it’s a double misdirection: you expect “stable” to be a material detail, a place to house an animal, a humble logistical problem. Ferlinghetti flips it into a diagnosis of the people themselves. The punchline isn’t just that they lacked a building; it’s that the entire enterprise of “settling down” was already a bad fit for their temperament. In eight words, “we weren’t very stable ourselves,” he converts a noun into a verdict.

That sleight of hand feels especially Ferlinghetti: Beat-adjacent, suspicious of bourgeois comfort, allergic to the myth that adulthood is a neat upgrade. The line’s self-deprecation matters. He’s not posturing as a romantic outlaw; he’s admitting a wobble, an unglamorous instability that undercuts any heroic narrative of bohemian life. It’s funny because it’s true in two directions: the world can be inhospitable to the poor and the unconventional, and the unconventional can also be inhospitable to the world’s expectations.

The context humming underneath is postwar America’s obsession with order - mortgages, careers, clean lines, clean consciences. Ferlinghetti helped build a counter-institution in City Lights, a storefront that became a refuge for the un-stabled: writers, radicals, wanderers, anyone allergic to the era’s polished certainty. The quote is a miniature manifesto disguised as a shrug. Stability isn’t just missing; it’s a suspect desire, and he’s wry enough to implicate himself in that suspicion.