Quotes from Frank O'Hara

all I want is a room up there and you in it

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!

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.

You just go on your nerve.

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

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.

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

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

the only thing to do is simply continue is that simple yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do can you do it yes, you can because it is the only thing to do

The moon passes into clouds so hurt by the street lights of your glance oh my heart

I take this for myself, and you take up the thread of my life between your teeth, tin thread and tarnished with abuse, you shall still hear as long as the beast in me maintains its taciturn power to close my lids in tears, and my loins move yet in the ennobling pursuit of all the worlds you have left me alone in, and would be the dolorous distraction from, while you summon your army of anguishes which is a million hooting blood vessels on the eyes and in the ears at that instant before death.

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

and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.

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

I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?

I'm so damned literary and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing I'm so damn empty

willow trees, willow trees they remind me of Desdemona I'm so damned literary and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of nothing

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.

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.

but to be part of the treetops and the blueness, invisible the iridescent darknesses beyond, silent, listening to the air becoming no air becoming air again

I can't even find a pond small enough to drown in without being ostentatious

Autobiographia Literaria" When I was a child I played by myself in a corner of the schoolyard all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tree and cried out "I am an orphan." And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems! Imagine!

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--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.

The stars blink like a hairnet that was dropped / on a seat and now it is lying in the alley behind / the theatre where my play is echoed by dying voices.