Frank O'Hara Quotes

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life

You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea

willow trees, willow trees they remind me of DesdemonaI'm so damned literaryand at the same time the waters rushing past remindme of nothing

Frank O'Hara

Oh say can you see Alma. The darlingof Them. All her friends were artists.They alone have memories. They alonelove flowers. They alone give partiesand die. Poor Alma. They alone.She died,and it was as if all the jewels in the worldhad heaved a sigh. The seismographat Fordham university registered, for once,a spiritual note. How like a sliverin her own short fat muscular foot.She loved the Western World, thoughthere are some who say she isn't really dead.

Frank O'Hara

I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence and sometimes, returning, I become the sea— in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.

Frank O'Hara

… my words are lovewhich willfully parades inits room, refusing to move.

Frank O'Hara

… and I’ll be happy here and happy there, fullof tea and tears

Frank O'Hara

Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won't know what you're up to it's true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images and when you grow old as grow old you must they won't hate you

Frank O'Hara

Stars are out and there is seaenough beneath the glistening earthto bear me toward the futurewhich is not so dark. I see.

Frank O'Hara

I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life’s fabric, to the world’s beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!

Frank O'Hara

you know we've all sinned a lot against scienceso we really ought to be as available as an appleon a boughpleasant thought fresh air free love cross-pollenizationoh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep

Frank O'Hara

Andalways embrace things, people earthsky stars, as I do, freely and withthe appropriate sense of space.

Frank O'Hara

I wouldn’t want to be faster or greener than now if you were with me O you were the best of all my days!

Frank O'Hara

I have been to lots of partiesand acted perfectly disgracefulbut I never actually collapsedoh Lana Turner we love you get up

Frank O'Hara

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.

Frank O'Hara

You just go on your nerve.

Frank O'Hara

...but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it...

Frank O'Hara

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

Frank O'Hara

My HeartI'm not going to cry all the timenor shall I laugh all the time,I don't prefer one "strain" to another.I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,not just a sleeper, but also the big,overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,often. I want my feet to be bare,I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, butthe better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Frank O'Hara

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.

Frank O'Hara

I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.

Frank O'Hara

Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac

Frank O'Hara

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my versesand my heart is closinglike a fist.

Frank O'Hara

My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up.

Frank O'Hara

After the first glass of vodkayou can accept just about anythingof life even your own mysteriousnessyou think it is nice that a boxof matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Swedenfor they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?

Frank O'Hara

I embraced a cloud,but when I soaredit rained.

Frank O'Hara

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leafto turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.There's nothing so spiritual about being happybut you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

Frank O'Hara

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Frank O'Hara