Federico Garcia Lorca

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!

There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain's tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog.

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.

Death laid its eggs in the wound

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

I sing your restless longing for the statue, your fear of the feelings that await you in the street. I sing the small sea siren who sings to you, riding her bicycle of corals and conches. But above all I sing a common thought that joins us in the dark and golden hours. The light that blinds our eyes is not art. Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.

Variación / Variations El remanso de aire bajo la rama del eco. El remanso del agua bajo fronda de luceros. El remanso de tu boca bajo espesura de besos. * The still waters of the air under the bough of the echo. The still waters of the water under a frond of stars. The still waters of your mouth under a thicket of kisses. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp

Theatre is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair

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

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

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

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