Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Federico Garcia Lorca

In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

With their souls of patent leather, they come down the road. Hunched and nocturnal, where they breathe they impose, silence of dark rubber, and fear of fine sand.

I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea.

There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.

To see you naked is to recall the Earth.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches.

New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.

As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.

The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

What's the furthest corner? Because that's where I want to be, alone with the only thing that I love.

A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them.

I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads

What shall I say about poetry? What shall I say about those clouds, or about the sky? Look; look at them; look at it! And nothing more. Don't you understand anything about poetry? Leave that to the critics and the professors. For neither you, nor I, nor any poet knows what poetry is.

The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along.

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.

In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.

The day that hunger is eradicated from the earth there will be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever known. Humanity cannot imagine the joy that will burst into the world.

The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.

At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon. A boy brought the white sheet at five in the afternoon. A frail of lime ready prepared at five in the afternoon. The rest was death, and death alone

In our eyes the roads are endless. Two are crossroads of the shadow.

Love is the kiss in the quiet nest while the leaves are trembling, mirrored in the water.

There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.

If blue is dream what then innocence? What awaits the heart if Love bears no arrows?

Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars and all roses are as white as my pain.

My God, I have come with the seeds of questions. I planted them, and they never flowered.

I sing your restless longing for the statue, your fear of the feelings that await you in the street. I sing the small sea siren who sings to you, riding her bicycle of corals and conches. But above all I sing a common thought that joins us in the dark and golden hours. The light that blinds our eyes is not art. Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.

A nation that does not support and encourage its theater is - if not dead - dying; just as a theater that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine color of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself theater; but only a place for amusement.

I put my head out of my window and see how much the wind’s knife wants to slice it off. On this unseen guillotine, I’ve placed the eyeless head of all my desires.

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.

The day we stop resisting our instincts, we'll have learned how to live.

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink - and in drinking understand themselves.

My poetry is a game. My life is a game. But I am not a game.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

The snow is falling on the deserted field of my life, and my hopes, which roam far, are afraid of becoming frozen or lost.

Old women can see through walls.

The weeping of the guitar begins. The goblets of dawn are smashed. The weeping of the guitar begins. Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it. It weeps monotonously as water weeps as the wind weeps over snowfields. Impossible to silence it. It weeps for distant things. Hot southern sands yearning for white camellias. Weeps arrow without target evening without morning and the first dead bird on the branch. Oh, guitar! Heart mortally wounded by five swords.

Those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.

We're all curious about what might hurt us.

Moon like a large stainedglass window that breaks on the ocean.

But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love.

The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand.

I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.

Every step we take on earth brings us to a new world.

Understand one single day fully, so you can love every night.

I've often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake

The duende....Where is the duende? Through the empty archway a wind of the spirit enters, blowing insistently over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents: a wind with the odour of a child's saliva, crushed grass, and medusa's veil, announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.

Green how I love you green. Green wind. Green boughs. The ship on the sea And the horse on the mountain.

The one thing life has taught me is that most people spend their lives bottled up inside their houses doing the things they hate.

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair

I'll always be happy if they'd leave me alone in that delightful and unknown furthest corner, apart from struggles, putrefactions and nonsense; the ultimate corner of sugar and toast, where the mermaids catch the branches of the willows and the heart opens to a flute's sharpness.

The day hunger disappears, the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever seen.

I will always be on the side of those who have nothing and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace.

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

...I am the immense shadow of my tears

My head is full of fire and grief and my tongue runs wild, pierced with shards of glass.