Frank OHara Quotes

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.

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

I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

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!

Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors

I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

I am always tying up and then deciding to depart.

You just go on your nerve.

life perpetuated in parti-colored loves and beautiful lies all in different languages.

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.

A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.

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