Frank O'Hara quotes

And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space. (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
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
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.
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
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. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is.
Frank O'Hara
I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.
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
That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.
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)
You just go on your nerve.
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
There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
Frank O'Hara
I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile.
Frank O'Hara
I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
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
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
Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible.
Frank O'Hara
I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
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)
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
The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.
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
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