Top 40 Frank O'Hara Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”

— Frank O'Hara

2. “Kerouac: You’re ruining American poetry, O’Hara. O’Hara: That’s more than you ever did for it, Kerouac.”

— Frank O'Hara

3. “Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!”

— Frank O'Hara

4. “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

5. “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love.”

— Frank O'Hara

6. “I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.”

— Frank O'Hara

7. “I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.”

— Frank O'Hara

8. “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.”

— Frank O'Hara

9. “The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it.”

— Frank O'Hara

10. “And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space.”

— Frank O'Hara

11. “I’m becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.”

— Frank O'Hara

12. “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

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Frank O'Hara

15. “I am ashamed of my century, but I have to smile.”

— Frank O'Hara

16. “The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.”

— Frank O'Hara

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images and when you grow old as grow old you must they won’t hate you.”

— Frank O'Hara

20. “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”

— Frank O'Hara

21. “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

22. “That’s not a run in your stocking, it’s a hand on your leg.”

— Frank O'Hara

23. “There’s too much lime in the world and not enough gin.”

— Frank O'Hara

24. “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

25. “Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.”

— Frank O'Hara

26. “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

27. “In retrospect, the saddest moment of one’s life would seem to be that in which one first became aware that sensibility must be protected by intelligence if it is to survive living. It is that realization that puts the bloodshed into adolescence. And the lack of that realization makes the rest of life a bloodshed.”

— Frank O'Hara

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

— Frank O'Hara

29. “There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.”

— Frank O'Hara

30. “I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?”

— Frank O'Hara

31. “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.”

— Frank O'Hara

32. “I don’t think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.”

— Frank O'Hara

33. “The artificial is always innocent.”

— Frank O'Hara

34. “O my enormous piano, you are not like being outdoors.”

— Frank O'Hara

35. “You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea.”

— Frank O'Hara

36. “Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”

— Frank O'Hara

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

— Frank O'Hara

38. “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

39. “You just go on your nerve.”

— Frank O'Hara

40. “There were occasionally rifts in the cloud where the face of a woman appeared, frowning.”

— Frank O'Hara

41. “And don’t worry about your lineage poetic or natural.”

— Frank O'Hara

42. “See how free we are! as a nation of persons.”

— Frank O'Hara

43. “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

44. “I wish I weren’t reeling at all.”

— Frank O'Hara

45. “Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?”

— Frank O'Hara

46. “But here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.”

— Frank O'Hara