Federico García Lorca
18 quotes
Biography
"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves."
"But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed."
"My head is full of fireand grief and my tongueruns wild, piercedwith shards of glass."
"Verde que te quiero verde. Verde viento. Verdes ramas. El barco sobre la mar y el caballo en la montaña."
"Verte desnuda es recordar la Tierra."
"Como no me he preocupado de nacer, no me preocupo de morir."
"Un muerto en España está más vivo como muerto que en ningún sitio del mundo."
"Las viejas vemos a través de las paredes."
"Siempre has sido lista. Has visto lo malo de las gentes a cien leguas... Pero los hijos son los hijos. Ahora estás ciega."
"I suppose he had the good luck to be executed, no? I had an hour's chat with him in Buenos Aires. He struck me as a kind of play actor, no? Living up to a certain role. I mean, being a professional Andalusian... But in the case of Lorca, it was very strange because I lived in Andalusia and the Andalusians aren't a bit like that. His were stage Andalusians. Maybe he thought that in Buenos Aires he had to live up to that character, but in Andalusia, people are not like that. In fact, if you are in Andalusia, if you are talking to a man of letters and you speak to him about bullfights, he'll say, 'Oh well, that sort of this pleases people, I suppose, but really the torero works in no danger whatsoever.' Because they are bored by these things, because every writer is bored by the local color in his own country. Well, when I met Lorca, he was being a professional Andalusian... Besides, Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very troubled about a very important figure in the contemporary world. A character in whom he could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who was this character and it turned out this character was Mickey Mouse. I suppose he was trying to be clever. And I thought, 'That's the kind of thing you say when you are very, very young and you want to astonish somebody.' But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way. But when he started in about Mickey Mouse being a symbol of America, there was a friend of mine there and he looked at me and I looked at him and we both walked away because we were too old for that kind of game, no? Even at that time."
"I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads"
"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"
"…And my heart openedlike a flower under sky,its petals of desire,its stamens of dreams…"
"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."
"Look at the longing, the anguish of a sad fossil world / that cannot find the accent of its first sob."
"Everyone understands the pain that accompanies death,but genuine pain doesn't live in the spirit,nor in the air, nor in our lives,nor on these terraces of billowing smoke.The genuine pain that keeps everything awakeis a tiny, infinite burnon the innocent eyes of other systems."
"The little boy was looking for his voice.(The king of the crickets had it.)In a drop of waterthe little boy was looking for his voice.I do not want it for speaking with;I will make a ring of itso that he may wear my silenceon his little fingerIn a drop of waterthe little boy was looking for his voice.(The captive voice, far away,put on a cricket's clo"
"A confused labyrinth of smoky starsentangles my hopes,which are nearly faded"