Top 100 Frank O'dea Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.
Frank O'Hara
#5. I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
Frank O'Hara
#6. 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
#7. I'm becoming
the street.
Who are you in love with?
me?
Straight against the light I cross.
Frank O'Hara
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. A man and woman in search of something are always blown apart, but it's the same wind that blows them.
Frank O'Connor
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.
Frank O'Hara
#18. See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Frank O'Hara
#19. 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
#20. I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life
Frank O'Hara
#21. The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.
Frank O'Hara
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#27. Then Frank said, 'Have you ever heard that when five o'clock comes, it's martini time? We could be right in the middle of a scene, but it's over for me, because it's martini time. Did you ever hear that?
James Kaplan
#28. When you are the only
passenger if there is a
place further from me
I beg you do not go
Frank O'Hara
#29. I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?
Frank O'Hara
#30. 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
#31. And I have mastered the speed and strength which is the
armor of the world.
Frank O'Hara
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. There's too much lime in the world and not enough gin
Frank O'Hara
#40. That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
Frank O'Hara
#41. In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.
Frank O'Hara
#42. 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
#43. O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.
Frank Herbert
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.
Frank O'Hara
#50. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart.
Frank O'Hara
#51. 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
#52. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.
Frank O'Hara
#53. 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
#54. ... 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
#55. Nerd Girl Problem # 235
That unexplainable crush you have on fictional characters.
Ella Frank
#56. 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
#57. Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
Frank O'Hara
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. To be cool,
decisive,
precise,
yes,
while the barn door hits you in the face
Frank O'Hara
#61. O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors
Frank O'Hara
#62. 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
#63. Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible
Frank O'Hara
#64. 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
#65. There were occasionally
rifts in the cloud where the face
of a woman appeared, frowning.
Frank O'Hara
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. ... and I'll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears
Frank O'Hara
#71. 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
#72. If you don't appear
at all one day they think you're lazy
or dead.
Frank O'Hara
#73. 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
#74. No man is as anti-feminist as a really feminine woman.
Frank O'Connor
#75. Dear:
I am dying
without you, and I won't be dying long. But don't come.
Best always,
Frank
Frank O'Hara
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Frank O'Hara
#81. 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
#83. I can't even find a pond small enough
to drown in without being ostentatious
Frank O'Hara
#84. I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
Frank O'Hara
#85. 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
#86. I have learned to regard fame as a will-o-wisp.
L. Frank Baum
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. Life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Frank O'Hara
#90. 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
#91. Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!
Frank O'Hara
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.
Frank O'Hara
#98. 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
#99. A man was the cause of it.
An unarmed man with a weapon.
Frank O'Hara
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
