Quotes from Frank O'Hara

they were too young then to know what they would ultimately need from a barren and heart-sore life...

The waves wash in, warm and salty, leaving your eyebrows white and the edge of your cheekbone. Your ear aches. You are lonely. On the underside of a satin leaf, hot with shade, a scorpion sleeps. And one Sunday I will be shot brushing my teeth. I am a native of this island.

you know we've all sinned a lot against science so we really ought to be as available as an apple on a bough pleasant thought fresh air free love cross-pollenization oh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep

Love is not gentle, like the dust of a room; love is a thing that happens in a room, and becomes dust.

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.

an invitation to lunch HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? when I only have 16 cents and 2 packages of yoghurt there's a lesson in that, isn't there like in Chinese poetry when a leaf falls? hold off on the yoghurt till the very last, when everything may improve

I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab which is typical and not just of modern life

Dear: I am dying without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come. Best always, Frank

Oh to be an angel (if there were any!), and go straight up into the sky and look around and then come down not to be covered with steel and aluminum glaringly ugly in the pure distances and clattering and buckling, wheezing 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

oh oh god how I'd love to dream let alone sleep it's night the soft air wraps me like a swarm it's raining and I have a cold I am a real human being with real ascendancies and a certain amount of rapture what do you do with a kid like me if you don't eat me I'll have to eat myself

It was all you, your graceful white smiles like a French word, the one for nursery, the one for brine.

You are so serious, as if a glacier spoke in your ear or you had to walk through the great gate of Kiev to get to the living room.

you were made in the image of god I was not I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver

we are all happy and young and toothless it is the same as old age 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

But here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.

and do I really want a son to carry on my idiocy past the Horned Gates

oh god it's so wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

Take my big clear eyes into your heart, and then pump my big clear eyes through your bloodstream, and! stick my big clear eyes on your feet

Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?

Love is first of all a lesson in utility.

Welcome me, if you will, as the ambassador of a hatred who knows its cause and does not envy you your whim of ending him.

Dear father of our country, so alive you must have lied incessantly to be immediate, here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag, bravely specific and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to a shore other than that the bridge reaches for. Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.

The winds will wash you out your hair, my dears. Passions will become turrets, to you.

We shall have everything we want and there'll be no more dying