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

O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

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

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

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

Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

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!

I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.

And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

Don't Worry Be Happy

I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority.

Too often the people complain that they have done nothing with their lives and then they wait for somebody to tell them that this isn't so.

Love can never grow old. Looks may lose their brown and gold. Cheeks may fade and hollow grow. But the hearts that love will know, never winter's frost and chill, summer's warmth is in them still.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

God does not always heal us instantly the way we think. He is not a jack-in-the-box God. But God is walking with me through this.

I was born a slave, but nature gave me a soul of a free man.

America believes what's good for us is good for the world. It's very difficult to understand that that's not necessarily true.

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top