Top 100 Frank O'connor Quotes
#1. Life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Frank O'Hara
#2. Dear:
I am dying
without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come.
Best always,
Frank
Frank O'Hara
#3. No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.
Frank O'Connor
#4. Frank actually looked shaken as he asked, "Does she get like that often?"
"Nope, you seem to rile her." Cord knew quite well how very few women had ever disconcerted his brother.
"I rile her? She wants to kill you, dismember you, and disperse your body parts, and I rile her?
Ellen O'Connell
#5. If you don't appear
at all one day they think you're lazy
or dead.
Frank O'Hara
#6. In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.
Frank McCourt
#7. ... and I'll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears
Frank O'Hara
#8. 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
#9. Don't listen to this asshole, Frank," laughed Kyle. "The kid is sitting there wearing a Dying Fetus t-shirt and talking sexual morality." "Well
Jeff O'Brien
#10. 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
#11. 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.
Frank O'Hara
#12. There were occasionally
rifts in the cloud where the face
of a woman appeared, frowning.
Frank O'Hara
#13. 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
#14. Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible
Frank O'Hara
#15. But the transition from the New York Times to the Ashton Clarion was like jumping off a speeding train into a wall of half-set Jell-O.
Frank E. Peretti
#16. O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors
Frank O'Hara
#17. To be cool,
decisive,
precise,
yes,
while the barn door hits you in the face
Frank O'Hara
#18. I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up
Frank O'Hara
#19. 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
#20. Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Frank O'Hara
#21. When I am feeling
depressed and anxious
sullen
all you have to do is
take off your clothes
and all is wiped away
revealing life's
tenderness.
Frank O'Hara
#22. Nerd Girl Problem # 235
That unexplainable crush you have on fictional characters.
Ella Frank
#23. ... and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything
continues to be possible
Frank O'Hara
#24. 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
#25. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
Frank O'Hara
#26. It's two o'clock in the morning, they're not going to get any nooky anyway, so this one guy and the guy with the t-shirt guy started sniffing the girls panties.
Frank Zappa
#27. 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.
Frank O'Hara
#28. A man was the cause of it.
An unarmed man with a weapon.
Frank O'Hara
#29. Muad'Dib: "If a child, an untrained person, an ignorant person, or an insane person incites trouble, it is the fault of authority for not predicting and preventing that trouble." O.C.
Frank Herbert
#30. I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Frank O'Hara
#31. I miss you always
when I go to the beach
the sand is wet with
tears that seem mine
although I never weep
and hold you in my
heart with a very real
humor you'd be proud of
Frank O'Hara
#33. All I know from my own experience is that the more loss we feel the more grateful we should be for whatever it was we had to lose. It means that we had something worth grieving for. The ones I'm sorry for are the ones that go through life not knowing what grief is.
Frank O'Connor
#34. The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.
Frank O'Connor
#35. 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
#36. Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
Frank O'Hara
#37. Tom looked more and more like a rabbi. As is the way of men of character in provincial towns, he tended to become a collection of mannerisms, a caricature of himself.
Frank O'Connor
#38. 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
Frank O'Hara
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-wisp.
L. Frank Baum
#42. 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
#43. I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
Frank O'Hara
#44. I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious
Frank O'Hara
#46. I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.
Frankie Cosmos
#47. My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Frank O'Hara
#49. 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
Frank O'Hara
#50. 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
#51. There's too much lime in the world and not enough gin
Frank O'Hara
#52. I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.
Frank O'Connor
#53. 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
Frank O'Hara
#54. 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
Frank O'Hara
#55. 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.
Frank O'Hara
#56. The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.
Frank O'Hara
#57. I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life
Frank O'Hara
#58. This world o' God's is brighter Than we ever dream or know; Its burdens growin' lighter- An' it's Love that makes 'em so! An' I'm thankful that I'm livin' Where Love's blessedness I see, 'Neath a Heaven that's forgivin' Where the bells ring 'Home' to me!
Frank Lebby Stanton
#59. See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Frank O'Hara
#60. And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.
Frank O'Hara
#61. A grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.
Frank O'Connor
#62. 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
#63. all I want is a room up there
and you in it
Frank O'Hara
#64. A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.
Frank O'Connor
#65. 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.
Frank O'Hara
#66. There's lots o' things folks don't 'preciate," replied the sailor-man. "If somethin' would 'most stop your breath, you'd think breathin' easy was the finest thing in life.
L. Frank Baum
#67. We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.
David Amram
#68. 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
#69. One of the things I've discovered at my age is I must have enchantment. And that was not clear to me in my earlier years. When I look at my favorite films, the Frank Capra - even Scorsese, even 'Goodfellas,' what makes that movie so remarkable is there's enchantment in their world.
David O. Russell
#70. I'm becoming
the street.
Who are you in love with?
me?
Straight against the light I cross.
Frank O'Hara
#71. 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
#72. I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
Frank O'Hara
#73. I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
Frank O'Hara
#74. This song is dedicated to Frank Zappa, and River Phoenix, Fred Gwynne who played Herman Munster, Dixie Lee Ray, Thomas P, Tip O'Neil, and you, dumb ass, who just threw water on me.
Kurt Cobain
#75. 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
#76. My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent
and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets.
He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals.
Frank O'Hara
#77. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart.
Frank O'Hara
#78. And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.
Frank O'Hara
#79. Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society ... As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel
an intense awareness of human loneliness.
Frank O'Connor
#80. When most people turn on their TVs, they don't expect a frank discussion of philosophical ideas in their practical context. Or any context.
David O. Russell
#81. Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn't be happy. One them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things.
Frank O'Connor
#82. I cant write about something I dont admire. It goes back to the old concept of the celebration: you celebrate the hero, an idea.
Frank O'Connor
#83. People loved to talk about how Frank O'Hara didn't really care about getting published. That doesn't jibe with my experience.
Eileen Myles
#84. O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.
Frank Herbert
#85. 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
#86. In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
Frank O'Hara
#87. That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
#89. 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
#90. 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
Frank O'Hara
#91. But, Mummy, couldn't God make another wars, but bad people."
"Oh!" I said.
I was disappointed about that. I began to think that God wasn't quite what he was cracked up to be.
Frank O'Connor
#93. I'm so damned literary
and at the same time the waters rushing past remind
me of nothing
I'm so damn empty
Frank O'Hara
#94. I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
Frank O'Hara
#95. But my dear young lady," he said offering a cigarette, "who ever said I have a poor opinion of women? On the contrary, I have a very high opinion of women, and the more I see of them the more I like them.
Frank O'Connor
#96. And I have mastered the speed and strength which is the
armor of the world.
Frank O'Hara
#97. Some of her last words to me, Mason, were 'I believe in fate and I believe you were supposed to walk into my life, so
Mason could walk into yours. I know she can't be wrong.
Ella Frank
#98. I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?
Frank O'Hara
#99. So Father Ring went off in the lofty mood of a man who has defended a principle at a great sacrifice to himself, but that very night he began to brood and he continued to brood till that sickly looking voluptuary of a ten-shilling note took on all the radiance and charm of a virgin of seventeen.
Frank O'Connor
#100. I was a great believer in hot buttered toast at all hours of the day.
Frank O'Connor
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