66+ Frank O'Hara Quotes On Friendship, Education And Rachmaninoff's Birthday

Frank O'Hara was an American poet, playwright and art critic from the 1950s and 1960s. He was a leader of the New York School of poetry, and his poetry is known for its wit, energy and vividness. O'Hara was also an influential figure in the New York art scene, and wrote art reviews for the New York Times and other publications. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Frank O'Hara on life, friendship, love.

Top 10 Frank O'Hara Quotes

1. O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors
2. 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
3. I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
4. Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
5. And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.
6. A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.
7. 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.
8. I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up
9. It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
• I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
• The artificial is always innocent.
• I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence
• I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
• See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
• My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
• Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!
• I wish I weren’t reeling at all.
• Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

Frank O'Hara Quotes About Life

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 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

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

There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. — Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara Quotes About Love

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist. — 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'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross. — 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

Frank O'Hara Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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 am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile. — 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

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side. — Frank O'Hara

That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg. — 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 don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. ... Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. ... As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. — Frank O'Hara

If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead. — Frank O'Hara

Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change? — 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

I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Negres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness — Frank O'Hara

Destroy yourself, if you don't know! — Frank O'Hara

There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning. — 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

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

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

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

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

There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so. — Frank O'Hara

I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. — Frank O'Hara

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

oh mothers you will have made the little tykes so happy because if nobody does pick them up in the movies they won't know the difference and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy — Frank O'Hara

You just go on your nerve. — Frank O'Hara

I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained. — Frank O'Hara

and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world. — Frank O'Hara

And one has eaten and one walks, past the magazines with nudes and the posters for bullfight and the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, which they'll soon tear down. — 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

Life Lessons by Frank O'Hara

1. Frank O'Hara's poetry encourages readers to live life to the fullest, to appreciate the beauty of the world around them, and to embrace the joys and sorrows of life.
2. He emphasizes the importance of being present in the moment and of finding beauty in the everyday.
3. His work also encourages readers to be true to themselves, to take risks, and to be open to new experiences.