Federico García Lorca
5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936
Place of birth: Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain
Best thing about him: Internationally acclaimed playwright, poet and stage director
Most important works: Blood Wedding, The House of Bernarda Alba, Gypsy Ballads
Interesting facts:
- He was friends with Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, sharing a very passionate relationship with the latter that was, however, never reciprocated
- He was arrested and executed by the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War
- His works were heavily censored and generally banned in the years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship
- Member of the literary movement known as Generation of ’27
20 of Federico García Lorca’s most beautiful quotes:
1.”To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
2.”I’ve often lost myself, in order to find the burn that keeps everything awake.”
3.”In each thing there is an insinuation of death. Stillness, silence, serenity are all apprenticeships.”
4.”As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”
5.”My poetry is a game. My life is a game. But I am not a game.”
6.”Understand one single day fully, so you can love every night.”
7.”I know there is no straight road, no straight road in this world. Only a giant labyrinth of intersecting crossroads.”
8.”Every step we take on earth brings us to a new world.”
9.”Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.”
10.”But hurry, let’s entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
11.”Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.”
12.”At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”
13.”A nation that does not support and encourage its theater is – if not dead – dying; just as a theater that does not capture with laughter and tears the social and historical pulse, the drama of its people, the genuine color of the spiritual and natural landscape, has no right to call itself theater; but only a place for amusement.”
14.”We’re all curious about what might hurt us.”
15.”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.”
16.”The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along.”
17.”In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.”
18.”The one thing life has taught me is that most people spend their lives bottled up inside their houses doing the things they hate.”
19.”To see you naked is to recall the Earth.”
20.”I want to be a poet, from head to toe, living and dying by poetry.”
