Lorca Poetry Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
— Jack Spicer

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

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

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

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

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

Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection - as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, "See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!" What does one do with all this crap? — Jack Spicer

In the rain-swept afternoon
my heart discovers
the tragedy of autumn
raining from the trees. — Martin Sorrell

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