Frank O'Hara citations

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“The stars fell
one by one into his eyes and burnt.”

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

“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 totallylife. It's more important to confirm the least sincere. The clouds get enough attention as it is…”

“I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.”

“I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.”

“I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.”

“That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.”

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

“I'm becoming
the street.
Who are you in love with?
me?
Straight against the light I cross.”

“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!”

“… 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…”

“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.”

“Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!”

“There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.”

“And
always embrace things, people earth
sky stars, as I do, freely and with
the appropriate sense of space.”

“I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up”

“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.”

“Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible”

“You just go on your nerve.”

“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.”

“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.”