Top 100 Federico Lorca Garcia Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Adam & Eve. The serpent cracked the mirror in a thousand pieces, & the apple was his rock.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#3. 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
#4. In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#5. 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
#8. I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads
Federico Garcia Lorca
#9. If lilies would grow
backwards,
if roses would grow
backwards,
if all those roots
could see the stars
& the dead not close
their eyes,
we would become like swans.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#11. The groom is like a flower of gold. When he walks, blossoms at his feet unfold.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#15. Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair
Federico Garcia Lorca
#16. 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
#18. But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#21. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. The mirror is the mother dew, the book of desiccated twilights, echo become flesh.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#29. Ever since I got married I've been thinking night and day about whose fault it was, and every time I think about it, out comes a new fault to eat up the old one; but always there's a fault left.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#30. My God, I have come with the seeds of questions. I planted them, and they never flowered.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#31. 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
#32. 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
#34. There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#35. 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
#36. All one's personality is embedded in gloves and hats after they've been good and used. Show me a glove and I'll tell you the character of its owner.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. Look at the longing, the anguish of a sad fossil world / that cannot find the accent of its first sob.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. 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
#49. If blue is dream
what then innocence?
What awaits the heart
if Love bears no arrows?
Federico Garcia Lorca
#50. Damned, damned be the rich! May not even their fingernails be left! ... I'm sure that they are going to Hell head-first.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#51. 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
#53. The moon carries the masks of meningitis into bedrooms, fills the wombs of pregnant women with cold water and, as soon as I'm not careful, throws handfuls of grass on my shoulders.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#54. Green how I love you green. Green wind. Green boughs. The ship on the sea And the horse on the mountain.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#55. 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
#56. My head is full of fire
and grief and my tongue
runs wild, pierced
with shards of glass.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#57. 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
#58. 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
#61. 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
#63. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#64. When the moon sails out
with a hundred faces all the same,
the coins made of silver
break out in sobs in the pocket.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#65. What's the furthest corner? Because that's where I want to be, alone with the only thing that I love.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#66. You can't look at yourself
in the ocean.
Your looks fall apart
like tendrils of light.
Night on earth.
- The Great Sadness
Federico Garcia Lorca
#67. The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#68. 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
#69. To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#71. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. The day hunger disappears, the world will see the greatest spiritual explosion humanity has ever seen.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#77. 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
#78. But hurry! so united, entwined,
mouths broken by love and soul bitten,
time will find us destroyed
Federico Garcia Lorca
#79. 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
#80. 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
#82. In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#83. 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
#84. 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
#86. 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
#88. Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#89. 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
#90. 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
#92. Hail, mute devil! You are the most intense animal. An eternal mystic of the fleshly inferno ...
Federico Garcia Lorca
#93. Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.
Federico Garcia Lorca
#95. 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
#97. 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
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
