Giannina Braschi Quotes

If you want to know what love is, have a child. If you want to know what pain is, bury him.

Poetry must find ways of breaking distance ... all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds.

What is liberty? The measure of dignity.

Ambulances always come with clouds of smoke. And then they disappear in a whistle. But what they bring is fear. Not freedom. Feardom is what they bring. And they bring fire and smoke. Oh, my nerves are bad tonight, yes, bad. I fear freedom. I, above all, fear the freedom that is above all feardom.

Metaphors and Similes are the beginning of the democratic system of envy.

Marketers keep inventing desires, necessities for you and for me. I need this. I need that. I need. I need. It's the need of a smoking fit. If you don't smoke that cigarette now, you'll die-when in reality you die because you succumb to the rage and rattle of the needy greed that keeps you busy needing more and more things. Is this the American Dream-the greedy need?

Solitude goes wherever you go, traveler.

We were fighting for them in wars against people that we had more in common with than with the United States of Banana.

Nativity is the enemy of prophecy.

If they bring you down, put you down, keep you down in a can of sardines – my question is the following – why did you let them pack you into a can of sardines – if you are not a sardine – and your boss and other sardines who are sardines don't realize that you are not a sardine? You've been so conditioned to act like a sardine – you think your canned existence is your sole existence – and you can't tell yourself apart from the other sardines that oppress you because you're all stuck together in one big clump […]. If you let them pack you into a sardine can, it's because you are a sardine – just like all the rest – made of salt and oil, scales and tails, slimy and thick.

Only what is fated to die is capable of living. Only what dies lives.