Frank O'Hara

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

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.'

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!

My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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?

I don't think I want to win anything I think I want to die unadorned.

When I am feeling depressed and anxious sullen _x000D_ all you have to do is take your clothes off _x000D_ and all is wiped away revealing life tenderness _x000D_ that we are flesh and breathe and are near us_x000D_ as you are really as you are I become as I_x000D_ really am alive and knowing vaguely what is_x000D_ and what is important to me above the intrusions_x000D_ of incident and accidental relationships_x000D_ which have nothing to do with my life

The stars fell one by one into his eyes and burnt.

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.