Frank O'Hara Quotes
oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much
Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
the only truth is face to face, the poem whose words become your mouth and dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are
And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.
Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.
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!
I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up
down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets on. They protect them from falling bricks, I guess.
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.
When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there. There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.
I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
I wonder if the course of narcissism through the ages would have been any different had Narcissus first peered into a cesspool. He probably did.
And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for bullfight and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down.
I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.
I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.
It may be the coldest day of The year, what does he think of That? I mean, what do I? And if I do, Perhaps I am myself again.
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.
the beauty of America, neither cool jazz nor devoured Egyptian heroes, lies in lives in the darkness I inhabit in the midst of sterile millions
I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.
There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won't know the difference and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy
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.
Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara. O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac
There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.
Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!
