Quotes by Federico Garcia Lorca

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

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

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

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

I can't listen to you. I can't listen to your voice. It's as though I'd drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along and I know I'm drowning -- but I go on down.

The first wild birds of the morning
Are breaking out of the trees.
And now the night is dying
On the sharp edge of the stone.
Let's find a corner of darkness
Where I will love you always,
And I won't care about people
Or the poison that they spread.

My God, I have come with
the seeds of questions.
I planted them, and they never flowered.

Since I know you don't like me, don't bother answering, because it would trouble you; but I remember you always and I keep a place for you in my heart, brimful of poetry.

I have often lost myself in the sea, ears full of newly cut flowers, tongue full of love and agony.

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.

The mirror
is the mother dew,
the book of desiccated
twilights, echo become flesh.

Between your love for me and mine for you
-- air of stars and tremor of plant --
a thicket of anemones raises
with a dark moan an entire year.

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!

The still pool of your mouth
under a thicket of kisses.

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

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

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.

What you wouldn't have suspected
lives and trembles in the air.
Those treasures of the day
you keep just out of reach.
These come and go in truckloads
but no one stops to see them.

Old women can see through walls.

You have always been smart. You have always looked for the worst in people, and have been quick to notice when people are up to no good... But in the case of your children, you are blind.

The groom
is like a flower of gold.
When he walks,
blossoms at his feet unfold.

Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue eyes or the accent
that by night the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek.

For each kiss I gave you
a huge cluster of tears!

My tongue is pierced with glass.

Let the skein never end
of I love you you love me, ever burnt
with decrepit sun and old moon;
for whatever you don't give me and I don't ask of you
will be for death, which does not leave
even a shadow on trembling flesh.

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

Lydia's madness is a watery madness, gentle, full of seagulls and lobsters.

It's a trick, love's word, a broken mirror, footsteps in the water. Then you'd leave me in the tomb again, just as everyone does when trying to convince those listening to them that true love is impossible.

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

Oh, what grief not to have
grief, and to spend your life
on the colorless grass
of the undecided path!

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

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.

In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.

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

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.

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

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.

Adam and Eve. The serpent cracked the mirror in a thousand pieces, and the apple was his rock.

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

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

Those who are afraid of death will carry it on their shoulders.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

The bride, the white bride today a maiden, tomorrow a wife.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The world is a shoulder of dark meat (black flesh of an old mule). And the light is on the other side.

Life is laughter amid a rosary of death.

Even money, which shines so much, spits sometimes.

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.

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

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

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.

Death, lonely death, Beneath the withered leaves.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

A dead man in Spain is more alive than a dead man anywhere in the world.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.

Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.

To see you naked is to recall the Earth.

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