Federico Garcia Lorca Quotes

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of
the dead dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

But hurry! so united, entwined,
mouths broken by love and soul bitten,
time will find us destroyed ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Understand one single day fully, so you can love every night. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I tried sex once with a woman and that woman was Gala. It was overrated. I tried sex once with a man and that man was the famous juggler Federico Garcia Lorca [the Spanish Surrealist poet]. It was very painful. ~ Salvador Dali

Green how I want you green. Green wind. Green branches. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

But two has never been a number
because it's only an anguish and its shadow,
it's only a guitar where love feels how hopeless it is,
it's the proof of someone else's infinity,
and the walls around a dead man,
and the scourging of a new resurrection that will never end. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

If I die,
leave the balcony open.

The little boy is eating oranges.
(From my balcony I can see him.)

The reaper is harvesting the wheat.
(From my balcony I can hear him.)

If I die,
leave the balcony open! ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I can't listen to you. I can't listen to your voice. It's as though I'd drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along – and I know I'm drowning – but I go on down. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

The dreadful nostalgia for a wasted life,
the fatal feeling that you were born too late,
or the restless hope for an impossible morning
with the nearby restlessness of the flesh's ache ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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! ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I'm still alive ... ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I am the immense shadow of my tears ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

The river Guadalquivir
Flows between oranges and olives
The two rivers of Granada
Descend from the snow to the wheat

Oh my love!
Who went and never returned

The river Guadalquivir
Has beards of maroon
The two rivers of Granada
One a cry the other blood

Oh my love!
Who vanished into thin air ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

Like a snake, my heart
has shed its skin.
I hold it here in my hand,
full of honey and wounds.

- New Heart ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Wish"

Just your hot heart,
nothing more.

My Paradise, a field,
no nightingales,
no strings,
a river, discrete,
and a little fountain.

Without the spurs,
of the wind, in the branches,
without the star,
that wants to be a leaf.

An enormous light
that will be
the flow
of the Other,
in a field of broken gazes.

A still calm
where our kisses,
sonorous circles
of echoes,
will open, far-off.

And your hot heart,
nothing more. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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.)

- The Little Mute Boy
Translated by William S. Merwin ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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 ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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! ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Moon like a large stainedglass window that breaks on the ocean. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

Small unhurt sorrows approach the hospitals
and every day the dead take off a suit of blood.
The architectures of frost,
the lyres and moans that escape the tiny leaves
in autumn, soaking the final slopes,
died out in the blackness of felt hats. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Farewell "

If I am dying,
leave the balcony open.

The child is eating an orange.
(From my balcony, I see him.)

The reaper is reaping the barley.
(From my balcony, I hear him.)

If I am dying,
leave the balcony open. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Here I want to see those men of hard voice.
Those that break horses and dominate rivers;
those men of sonorous skeleton who sing
with a mouth full of sun and flint. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

The golden girl
bathed in the water
and the water turned gold ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

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.

- Hour of Stars (1920) ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

Every step we take on earth brings us to a new world. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

The air
pregnant with rainbows
shatters its mirrors
over the grove.

- Air ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

To see you naked is to remember the Earth,
the smooth Earth, clean of horses,
the Earth without reeds, pure form,
closed to the future, confine of silver.
To see you naked is to understand the desire
of rain that looks for the delicate waist,
or the fever of the broad-faced sea
that cannot find the light of its cheek.
Blood will ring through the bedrooms
and will come with flaming swords,
but you will not know the hiding places
of the violet or the heart of the toad.
Your womb is a struggle of roots.
Your lips are a dawn without contour.
Under the lukewarm roses of the bed
the dead men moan, awaiting their return. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

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 ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

It was the time of parched things,
the wheat spear in the eye, the laminated cate,
the time of tremendous, rusting bridges
and the deathly silence of cork. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

When the moon sails out
with a hundred faces all the same,
the coins made of silver
break out in sobs in the pocket. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

The bride, the white bride today a maiden, tomorrow a wife. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Every song
is the remains
of love.

Every light
the remains
of time.
A knot
of time.

And every sigh
the remains
of a cry.

- Every Song ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

The Great Sadness
You can't look at yourself
in the ocean.
Your looks fall apart
like tendrils of light.
Night on earth. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

Stigmata of Love
A light which lives on what the flames devour,
a grey landscape surrounding me with scorch,
a crucifixion by a single wound,
a sky and earth that darken by each hour,
a sob of blood whose red ribbon adorns
a lyre without a pulse, and oils the torch,
a tide which stuns and strands me on the reef,
a scorpion scrambling, stinging in my chest
this is the wreath of love, this bed of thorns
is where I dream of you stealing my rest,
haunting these sunken ribs cargoed with grief.
I sought the peak of prudence, but I found
the hemlock-brimming valley of your heart,
and my own thirst for bitter truth and art. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of the kind whose bodily senses were shaped in a world that is not our own and that few people are able to perceive. A poet closer to death than to philosophy, closer to pain than to intelligence, closer to blood than to ink. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

...I see fetal sciences in you,
mummified poems, and bones
of my romantic secrets
and old innocence.

Shall I hang you on the wall
of my emotional museum,
beside the dark, chill,
sleeping irises of my evil?

Or shall I spread you over the pines
―suffering book of my love―
so you can learn about the song
the nightingale offers the dawn?... ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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 ... ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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.

- Ditty of First Desire ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Only a single bird

is singing.

The air is cloning it.

We hear through mirrors. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Every Song
Every song
is the remains
of love.
Every light
the remains
of time.
A knot
of time.
And every sigh
the remains
of a cry. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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.

- Night of Sleepless Love ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Look at the longing, the anguish of a sad fossil world / that cannot find the accent of its first sob. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. ~ W.S. Merwin

But now I am no longer I,
nor is my house any longer my house. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Old women can see through walls. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca