Frank O'Hara Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

Frank O'Hara
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

Frank O'Hara
When I am feeling
depressed and anxious
sullen
all you have to do is
take off your clothes
and all is wiped away
revealing life's
tenderness.

Frank O'Hara
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

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
You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

Frank O'Hara
I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.

Frank O'Hara
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey. 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.

Frank O'Hara
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

Frank O'Hara
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.

Frank O'Hara
My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.

Frank O'Hara
I loved her fright, which was against me into the air! and the diamond white of her forelock which seemed to smart with thoughts as my heart smarted with life! and she'd toss her head with the pain and paw the air and champ the bit, as if I were Endymion and she, moon-like, hated to love me.

Frank O'Hara
There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.

Frank O'Hara
I call
to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

Frank O'Hara
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

Frank O'Hara
If you don't appear
at all one day they think you're lazy
or dead.

Frank O'Hara
I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Negres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

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

Frank O'Hara
I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.

Frank O'Hara
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.

Frank O'Hara
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

Frank O'Hara
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.

Frank O'Hara
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.

Frank O'Hara
It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.

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
Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

Frank O'Hara
And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space.

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

Frank O'Hara
I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

Frank O'Hara