Quotes from 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...

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

In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.

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

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.

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.

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

Leaf! you are so big! How can you change your color, then just fall! As if there were no such thing as integrity!

and I'll be happy here and happy there, full of tea and tears

It's a bright summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.

Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible

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...

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

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

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

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

The artificial is always innocent.

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.

I am moved by the multitudes of your intelligence and sometimes, returning, I become the sea— in love with your speed, your heaviness and breath.

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

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

when I think of all the things I've been thinking of I feel insane