Frank O'Hara Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Frank O'Hara
I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to.

Frank O'Hara
I love you. I love you, but I'm turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.

Frank O'Hara
It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet It's twelve poems, I call
it oranges.

Frank O'Hara
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.

Frank O'Hara
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

Frank O'Hara
If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out "I am an orphan." And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

Frank O'Hara
And I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.

Frank O'Hara
It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Frank O'Hara
It is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

Frank O'Hara
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, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

Frank O'Hara
There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.

Frank O'Hara
I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.

Frank O'Hara
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.

Frank O'Hara
"Sun, don't go!" I was awake
at last. "No, go I must, they're calling
me."
"Who are they?"
Rising he said, "Some day you'll know. They're calling to you too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

Frank O'Hara
There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.

Frank O'Hara
Life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Frank O'Hara
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Frank O'Hara
If I am ever to find these trees meaningful I must have you by the hand. As it is, they stretch dusty fingers into an obscure sky, and the snow looks up like a face dirtied with tears. Should I cry out and see what happens? There could only be a stranger wandering in this landscape, cold, unfortunate, himself frozen fast in wintry eyes.

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