Federico 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

That's what I always loved about [Federico] Fellini's films: You see the weird joy of the weird filmmaking family and the abstract craziness that goes along with it, and there's something about it that's quite beautiful. ~ Tim Burton

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

I don't like the idea of "understanding" a film. I don't believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn't. If you are moved by it, you don't need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it. ~ Federico Fellini

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

It takes just one wave to capsize a boat, and one more to take it down. ~ Federico Chini

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

We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we're faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off. ~ Federico Fellini

Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism. ~ Federico Fellini

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

Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present. ~ Federico Fellini

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

A horse gallops with his lungs, perseveres with his heart, and wins with his character. ~ Federico Tesio

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together. ~ Federico Fellini

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

There a lot of numbers you are going to pass for your life,
Zero- is a born number
One- is a lonely number
Two- is a number of love
Three- is a number of incomplete family
Four- is a number of Family ~ Federico Lomibao

The greatest pleasure does not consist in experiencing new things, but in savoring the infinite variation of what we already know ~ Federico Castigliano

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious. ~ Federico Fellini

Once words have been said there is no way to un-say them ~ Federico Chini

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

Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair. ~ Federico Fellini

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

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me. ~ Federico Fellini

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

You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way. ~ Federico Fellini

I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician. ~ Federico Fellini

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

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography. ~ Federico Fellini

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

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything. ~ Federico Fellini

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

Its important not to focus so much on the statistics, but [on people's] perceptions. ~ Federico Pena

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

Never trust a woman who doesn't like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed. ~ Federico Fellini

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

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet ... maybe we could understand something. ~ Federico Fellini

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

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist. ~ Federico Fellini

It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman. ~ Federico Fellini

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

Paris is narcotic for a man alone, a never-ending labyrinth where the anxiety of freedom is relieved. ~ Federico Castigliano

Fate is written in the face. ~ Federico Fellini

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

I spent my life trying to cure myself of my education. ~ Federico Fellini

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

There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.) ~ Federico Fellini

Georgian film is a completely unique phenomenon, vivid, philosophically inspiring, very wise, childlike. There is everything that can make me cry and I ought to say that it (my crying) is not an easy thing. ~ Federico Fellini

The real woman does not want to be equal but different. ~ Federico Mangahas

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

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be. ~ Federico Fellini

The Thoroughbred exists because its selection has depended, not on experts, technicians, or zoologists, but on a piece of wood: the winning post of the Epsom Derby. If you base your criteria on anything else, you will get something else, not the Thoroughbred. ~ Federico Tesio

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

I have long been seduced by the idea of losing myself, persuaded by the thought that there was something poetic in this dissipation. I thought that the destiny of every true flâneur was to immerse himself in the panorama surrounding him, to the point of becoming one with it and, ultimately, to vanish. ~ Federico Castigliano

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

The loss of a loved one is like the loss of a part of oneself; an arm or a leg. At first, the pain is so physical that it is hard to ignore. The trauma is so intense that the mind finds it hard to cope with the loss. With time the pain eases, the body recovers and the brain figures out new ways to go on. ~ Federico Chini

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

The greatest danger for artists is total freedom. ~ Federico Fellini

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

I think we're [me and my son] different. He plans, organizes and intellectualizes more than I do. It wasn't until I worked with Federico Fellini that I understood what my problem was. ~ Donald Sutherland

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

I always direct the same film. I can't distinguish one from the other. ~ Federico Fellini

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

One of the greatest handicaps is to fear a mistake. You have stopped yourself. You have to move freely into the arena, not just to wait for the perfect situation, the perfect moment ... If you have to make a mistake, it's better to make a mistake of action than one of inaction. If I had the opportunity again, I would take chances. ~ Federico Fellini

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

One doesn't remember one's own life chronologically, the way it happened, what was most important, or even what seemed most important. We are not in control of our memories. One doesn't own one's memories. One is owned by them. ~ Federico Fellini

Remorse shows the difference between a cruel person and one that is not. ~ Federico Chini