Frank O'Hara
15 quotes
Biography
"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 leafto turn away from the sun -- it loves it there.There's nothing so spiritual about being happybut you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last."
"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..."
"Kerouac: You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara.O'Hara: That's more than you ever did for it, Kerouac"
"I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile."
"That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg."
"Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!"
"I have been to lots of partiesand acted perfectly disgracefulbut I never actually collapsedoh Lana Turner we love you get up"
"...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..."
"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."
"I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love."
"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."
"Andalways embrace things, people earthsky stars, as I do, freely and withthe appropriate sense of space."
"I am stuck in traffic in a taxicabwhich is typicaland not just of modern life"