I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my verses and my heart is closing like a fist.
Frank O'HaraRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses a desire for tangible signs of life's enjoyment amidst the mundanity of everyday life.
In this quote, Frank O'Hara reflects on the interconnection of urban life and the appreciation of simple pleasures. He suggests that the enjoyment of something as ordinary as a blade of grass is amplified by the presence of human activities and cultural markers, like a subway or a record store, which affirm that people are engaging with life in meaningful ways. The emphasis on 'the least sincere' underlines a need for genuine experiences in a world often filled with superficiality.
Themes
LifeEnjoymentUrbanCultureSincerity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of appreciating the little things in life.
More from Frank O'Hara
All quotes →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'HaraRead
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'HaraRead
My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
Frank O'HaraRead
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.
Frank O'HaraRead
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?
Frank O'HaraRead
Similar quotes
For darkness restores what light cannot repair.
Joseph BrodskyRead
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
Ryan HolidayRead
When the doors of perception are cleansed, men will see things as they truly are, infinite.
William BlakeRead
What would life be like if everybody insisted you must have actually built such-and-such a thing by yourself? I'd be an old man and have nothing to show for the aging.
Ludwig Mies Van Der RoheRead
Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.
Thomas LynchRead
The missionaries go forth to Christianize the savages - as if the savages weren't dangerous enough already.
Edward AbbeyRead