Frank O'Hara Quotes
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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.
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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.
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That's not a run in your stocking, it's a hand on your leg.
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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!
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And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural.
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I have, for my own projected works and ideas, only the silliest and dewiest of hopes; no matter what, I am romantic enough or sentimental enough to wish to contribute something to life's fabric, to the world's beauty.... [S]imply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!
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Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. 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.
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I take this for myself, and you take up the thread of my life between your teeth, tin thread and tarnished with abuse, you shall still hear as long as the beast in me maintains its taciturn power to close my lids in tears, and my loins move yet in the ennobling pursuit of all the worlds you have left me alone in, and would be the dolorous distraction from, while you summon your army of anguishes which is a million hooting blood vessels on the eyes and in the ears at that instant before death.
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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.
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There is a geography which holds its hands just so far from the breast and pushes you away, crying so.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The artificial is always innocent.
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I am not a painter. I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not.
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I wish I weren’t reeling at all.
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When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen all you have to do is take your clothes off and all is wiped away revealing life tenderness that we are flesh and breathe and are near us as you are really as you are I become as I really am alive and knowing vaguely what is and what is important to me above the intrusions of incident and accidental relationships which have nothing to do with my life
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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.
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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.
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The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.
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A man was the cause of it all. An unarmed man with a weapon.
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Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.
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I embraced a cloud but when I soared it rained.
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Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.
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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
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I'm becoming the street. Who are you in love with? me? Straight against the light I cross.
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and I have mastered the speed and strength which is the armor of the world.
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Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change?
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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.'
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I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.
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