Top 113 Quotes & Sayings by Federico Garcia Lorca - Page 2

New York is a meeting place for every race in the world, but the Chinese, Armenians, Russians, and Germans remain foreigners. So does everyone except the blacks. There is no doubt but that the blacks exercise great influence in North America, and, no matter what anyone says, they are the most delicate, spiritual element in that world.

Adam & Eve. The serpent cracked the mirror in a thousand pieces, & the apple was his rock.

In the garden I will die. In the rosebush they will kill me.

Ever since I got married I've been thinking night and day about whose fault it was, and every time I think about it, out comes a new fault to eat up the old one; but always there's a fault left.

Damned, damned be the rich! May not even their fingernails be left!... I'm sure that they are going to Hell head-first.

Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.

Devoutly the teachers point out huge fumigated domes; but beneath the statues there's no love, no love beneath the eyes set in crystal. Love is there, in flesh ripped by thirst, in the tiny hut struggling against the flood; love is there, in ditches where snakes of hunger wrestle, in the sad sea that rocks dead gulls, and in the darkest stinging kiss under pillows.

The theater has to impose itself on the public, and not the public on the theater... The word "Art" should be written everywhere, in the auditorium and in the dressing rooms, before the word "Business" gets written there.

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. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river.

I have often lost myself in the sea, ears full of newly cut flowers, tongue full of love and agony.

Never let me lose the marvel of your statue-like eyes, or the accent the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek at night. I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair. If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master, never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

Pero yo ya no soy yo Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But now I am no longer I, nor is my house any longer my house.

Ditty of First Desire In the green morning I wanted to be a heart. A heart. And in the ripe evening I wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale. (Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.) In the vivid morning I wanted to be myself. A heart. And at the evening's end I wanted to be my voice. A nightingale. Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.

At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verde ramas. Green I love you green. Green Wind. Green branches.

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood.

The dancer's trembling heart must bring everything into harmony, from the tips of her shoes to the flutter of her eyelashes, from the ruffles of her dress to the incessant play of her fingers.

Hail, mute devil! You are the most intense animal. An eternal mystic of the fleshly inferno.

A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world.

Oh honey, there's nothing new on this earth when it comes to what men and women do in the dark. First love is when you learn. So you've learned that love can open you up like spring sun on a wee primrose. Good. Remember that. You know how to love.

Little black horse. Where are you taking your dead rider?

Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.

Seville is a tower full of fine archers.... Under the arch of the sky, across the clear plain, she shoots the constant arrow of her river.

While the poet wrestles with the horses on his brain and the sculptor wounds his eyes on the hard spark of alabaster, the dancer battles the air around her, air that threatens at any moment to destroy her harmony or to open huge open empty spaces where her rhythm will be annihilated.

There's no doubt that I really have a feeling for the theater. These past few days it has occurred to me to do a comedy whose chief characters are photographic enlargements. Those people we see in doorways. Newlyweds, sergeants, dead girls, an anonymous crowd full of mustaches and wrinkles. It should be terrible. If I focus it well, it will possess pathos without consolation. In the midst of those people I will place an authentic fairy.

Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death, but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit, nor in the air, nor in our lives, nor on these terraces of billowing smoke. The genuine pain that keeps everything awake is a tiny, infinite burn on the innocent eyes of other systems.

I'm afraid to be on this shore a trunk without limbs, and what I most regret is not to have flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my suffering.

The groom is like a flower of gold. When he walks, blossoms at his feet unfold.

Death laid its eggs in the wound

What you wouldn't have suspected lives & trembles in the air. Those treasures of the day you keep just out of reach. These come & go in truckloads but no one stops to see them.

We're all like the little sailor. From the harbors we hear the strains of accordions and the murky soapy noises of the docks, from the mountains we receive the dish of silence that the shepherds eat, but we don't hear more than our own distances. And what distances without end and without doors and without mountains!

Variación / Variations El remanso de aire bajo la rama del eco. El remanso del agua bajo fronda de luceros. El remanso de tu boca bajo espesura de besos. * The still waters of the air under the bough of the echo. The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp

Everything's a fan. Brother, open up your arms. God is the pivot.

Even money, which shines so much, spits sometimes.

The mirror is the mother dew, the book of desiccated twilights, echo become flesh.

The bride, the white bride today a maiden, tomorrow a wife.

The world is a shoulder of dark meat (black flesh of an old mule). And the light is on the other side.

If I told you the whole story it would never end...What's happened to me has happened to a thousand woman.

The Little Mute Boy The little boy was looking for his voice. (The king of the crickets had it.) In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. I do not want it for speaking with; I will make a ring of it so that he may wear my silence on his little finger In a drop of water the little boy was looking for his voice. (The captive voice, far away, put on a cricket's clothes.) Translated by William S. Merwin

I'm satisfied. I am progressively making my life and my name in the surest and purest manner. If I catch on in the theater, as I think I will, all the doors will gladly open wide for me.

Death, lonely death, Beneath the withered leaves.

The moon carries the masks of meningitis into bedrooms, fills the wombs of pregnant women with cold water and, as soon as I'm not careful, throws handfuls of grass on my shoulders.

My tongue is pierced with glass.

What matters most has an ultimate metallic quality of death. The chasuble and the wagon wheel, the razor and the prickly beards of shepherds, the bare moon, a fly, humid cupboards, rubble piles, the images of saints covered in lace, quicklime, and the wounding edges of the rooflines and watchtowers.

Men like to pleasure us, girl. They like to undo our plaits and give us water to drink from their own mouths. That's what makes the world go round.

All one's personality is embedded in gloves and hats after they've been good and used. Show me a glove and I'll tell you the character of its owner.

Night of Sleepless Love The night above. We two. Full moon. I started to weep, you laughed. Your scorn was a god, my laments moments and doves in a chain. 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. Dawn married us on the bed, our mouths to the frozen spout of unstaunched blood. The sun came through the shuttered balcony and the coral of life opened its branches over my shrouded heart.

Fire is fed by fire. The same small flame destroys Two stalks of wheat at once.

Just as the light and weightless vegetation of saltpeter floats over the old walls of houses as soon as the owner gets careless, so the literary vocation springs up in you.

The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!

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. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.

Relish the fresh landscape of my wound, break rushes and delicate rivulets, drink blood poured on honeyed thigh.