Quotes & Sayings About Lorca

I'll emerge, with wings, from the banner I am, bird
that never alights on trees in the garden
I will shed my skin and my language.
Some of my words of love will fall into
Lorca's poems; he'll live in my bedroom
and see what I have seen of the Bedouin moon. I'll emerge
from almond trees like cotton on sea foam — Mahmoud Darwish

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

Poetry was a discipline grounded in experience that drew its life and worth from a source much greater than oneself, and as it realized its potential to touch others in their innermost being, what [Kathleen] Fraser has termed their "yearning side," it could be a profoundly communal act. Poetry, when it succeeded, did so in ways that were not quantifiable, and did not look much like worldly success, but that might be summed up as the joy on the face of a girl in a dingy classroom who finds a kindred spirit in a poem by Garcia Lorca. — Kathleen Norris

You told me once
about how they used
to build whole city states
out of poems
how everything you see here
is made out of
the bones of dreams
how having a stiff
drink with lorca meant
you had to write
everything down right away
lately the words just
won't come — John Dorsey

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

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

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

The children watch
a distant point.
Lamps go out.
Some blind girls
question the moon
and spirals of grief
rise in the air.
The mountains survey
a distant point.

- After Passing By — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

Death, vicious death, Leave a green branch for love. — Federico Garcia Lorca

My tongue is pierced with glass. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. — 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

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

But hurry! so united, entwined,
mouths broken by love and soul bitten,
time will find us destroyed — 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

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

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? — Allen Ginsberg

The mirror is the mother dew, the book of desiccated twilights, echo become flesh. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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. — 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

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

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

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

To see you naked is to recall the Earth. — 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

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

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

Death laid its eggs in the wound
— Federico Garcia Lorca

Gacela of the Flight"

I have lost myself in the sea many tunes
with my ear full of freshly cut flowers,
with my tongue full of love awl agony.
I have lost myself in the sea many times
as I lose myself in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who in giving a kiss
does not feel the smile of faceless people,
and no one who in touching a newborn child
forgets the motionless skulls of horses.

Because the roses search in the forehead
for a hard landscape of hone
and the hands of man hate no other purpose
than to imitate the roots below the earth.

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children,
I have lost myself in the sea many times.
Ignorant of the water I go seeking
a death full of light to consume me. — Federico Garcia Lorca

I denounce everyone
who ignores the other half,
the half that can't be redeemed — 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

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

Photography ... unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the limimal - the border between what we see and what we suspect. — Philip-Lorca DiCorcia

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

I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry. — 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

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

Old women can see through walls. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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 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 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

Air
The air
pregnant with rainbows
shatters its mirrors
over the grove. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

Life is laughter amid a rosary of death. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead. — 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

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

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair — 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

I walk with Federico Garcia Lorca around the Upper West Side in Manhattan because that was a neighborhood he lived in and I imagine walking around Paris with Cesar Vallejo, a great Peruvian poet who lived in Paris. And I kind of create the walk as a kind of drama of my apprenticeship. — Edward Hirsch

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery. — 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

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

After Passing By
The children watch
a distant point.
Lamps go out.
Some blind girls
question the moon
and spirals of grief
rise in the air.
The mountains survey
a distant point. — 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

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 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

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

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

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. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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. — 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

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. — 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

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

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

A confused labyrinth
of smoky stars
entangles my hopes,
which are nearly faded — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world. — 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 snow is falling on the deserted field of my life, and my hopes, which roam far, are afraid of becoming frozen or lost. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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. — Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

- Air — Federico Garcia Lorca

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. — Federico Garcia Lorca

My head is full of fire
and grief and my tongue
runs wild, pierced
with shards of glass. — 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

Paint me a heaven of love with your bloodied mouth. — 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

The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas. — Marie-Helene Bertino

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

Out in the sky, no one sleeps. No one, no one.
No one sleeps.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of an arid landscape in his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.
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 snow's edge with the voices of dead dahlias.
But there is no oblivion; no dream:
only flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a tangle of new veins,
and those who hurt will hurt without rest
and those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders. — 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

Even money, which shines so much, spits sometimes. — 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

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

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