Frank O'Hara Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors”
-- 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 -
“I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!”
-- 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 -
“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible”
-- 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 -
“I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. 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 -
“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.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen all you have to do is take your clothes off and all is wiped away revealing life tenderness that we are flesh and breathe and are near us as you are really as you are I become as I really am alive and knowing vaguely what is and what is important to me above the intrusions of incident and accidental relationships which have nothing to do with my life”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“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 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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!) Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline 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 -
“life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?”
-- Frank O'Hara -
“Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies.”
-- Frank O'Hara
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