Hannah > Hannah's Quotes

“Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”
― Frank O'Hara, Meditations in an Emergency

“And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

“You know what Sunday is, it's a day with a lot of potential for naps.”
― Polly Horvath

“Having a Coke with You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
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

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it”
― Frank O'Hara

“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”
― Frank O'Hara

“My Heart

I'm not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don't prefer one "strain" to another.
I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind.
I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says "That's not like Frank!," all to the good! I don't wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,
often. I want my feet to be bare,
I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--you can't plan on the heart, but
the better part of it, my poetry, is open.”
― Frank O'Hara

“Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!”
― Frank O'Hara

“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn't boring.”
― Zelda Fitzgerald, The Collected Writings

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“My sister had taught me to look at the world that way, as a place that glitters, as a place where the calls of the crickets and the crows and the wind are everyday occurrences that also happen to be magic.”
― Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira

“Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“Oh, it is wonderful to wake up in the morning with things to look forward to!”
― Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

“The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance. The wise grows it under his feet.”
― James Oppenheim

“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'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara

“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

“Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them?...Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone?”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“Suddenly I realize that everyone in the whole world is, at the end of a day, staring at a dusky horizon, owner of a day that no one else will ever know.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“Yesterday I was so full of hope. My life seemed blessed, full of adventures and answered prayers, and now something very, very bad has happened and it will never be the same again. And it all happened because I was greedy. Because I couldn't have an ordinary life. Because I was so taken with the wonders of the world that I could not be content with anything less than the constant awareness of its miracles.”
― Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures

“I wonder if children don't begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.”
― Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

“We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.”
― Kathleen Norris

“I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?”
― Kathleen Norris, The Psalms with Commentary

“Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.”
― Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
― Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
― Maya Angelou

“Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.”
― Maya Angelou

“The desire to reach for the stars is ambitious. The desire to reach hearts is wise.”
― Maya Angelou