Top Frank O'Hara Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Frank O'Hara Biography

Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet and art critic. Because of his employment as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure in the New York School—an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements.

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Frank O'Hara Quotes

Destroy yourself, if you don't know!

Destroy, Ifs, Know, Knows

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

Difference, Differences, Mother, Mothers, Movie, Somebody

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.

Clothes, Feelings, I Love You, Revealing, Sullen, Tenderness

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.

Cooked, Excessive, Giving, Kids, Like, Mother

Grace
to be born and live as variously as possible

Born, Grace, Live, Variously

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.

Beautiful, Beloved, Final, Finals, Plot, Trap

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. '

Chasing, Knives, Running, Shout, Star, Stars

If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead.

Appear, Dead, Lazy, Think, Thinking, Work

And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.

Lineage, Natural, Poetic, Worry

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.

Bad, Believe, Common Sense, Elaborately, Enough, Pain

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.

Choose, Dirtiest, Pieces, Suntans, Valleys, Want

I call to the spirits of other lands to make fecund my existence

Fecund, Inspirational, Land, Lands, Make, Spirit

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

Cry, Crying, Geography, Hands

After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own mysteriousness you think it is nice that a box of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?

Feelings, Matches, Nice, Stupid, Writing

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.

Age, Course, Different, Firsts, Peered, Wonder

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf to turn away from the sun -- it loves it there. There's nothing so spiritual about being happy but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

Come, Happy, Loves, Missing, Spiritual, Want

The artificial is always innocent.

Artificial, Innocence, Innocent

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.

Eye, Hands, Like, Meaningful, See, Wintry

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

Believe, Breathing, Forth, Front, Light, New York

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

Lattimore, Les, Negres, Play, Sleep, Thinking

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