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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the haunting and mysterious nature of life, portraying beings that evoke both fear and awe.
In this quote, Federico Garcia Lorca evokes a vivid and surreal imagery of figures moving through the darkness. Their 'souls of patent leather' suggest a shiny, artificial quality, while the juxtaposition of 'silence of dark rubber' and 'fear of fine sand' conveys a sense of foreboding and the weight of existence. Lorca's use of nocturnal imagery emphasizes the unknown and the hidden aspects of life, prompting the reader to reflect on the darker elements of the human experience.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the complexities of human nature.
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.
Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.
What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer.
When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us
But I'd be lying if I didn't say that every time you go to make a film, you're desperate to either do it better than you did it last time or to not repeat yourself.
I value the people who are willing to make themselves vulnerable and share work that is sensitive and maybe even hard to sing sometimes. Because that's the music that provides the most solace and solidarity to the world.
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
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