Federico Garcia Lorca Quotes

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We're all curious about what might hurt us.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

To see you naked is to recall the Earth.

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.

...I am the immense shadow of my tears