Quotes from Giannina Braschi

Poetry must find ways of breaking distance.... all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds.

Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.

I love hiccups and I love sneezes and I love blinks and I love belches and I love gluttons. I love hair. I love bears. For me, the round. For me, the world.

Questions don't change the truth. But they give it motion.

If you want to know what love is, have a child. If you want to know what pain is, bury him.

Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.

Zarathustra: Do you have words? Do your words belong to you? Giannina: No, my answer is no. I have no property in the dictionary. Words are anonymous like the disenfranchised masses that haven't been weighed - or named - or framed. My words belong to those who don't belong.

We can't be ambassadors because we don't have a country. Puerto Rico is not a country with any power in the world, I won't be considered a great poet. Spain created great poets with its empire and made them known around the world through its empire. Great poetry has always stemmed from the economic prosperity of a people. That is why we have Quevedo and Gongora.

The powers of the world are shifting. Culture is becoming more relevant than politics. Cities more relevant than nations. Continents more relevant than nations. But continents less relevant than cities. Languages more relevant than nations. Languages are alive. Nations are dead. I should not be concerned about what is alive or dead. Yes, I should. I want what is alive - not what is dead - following what is dead delays my path.

Don't get me wrong. A thinker thought, maybe it was Ortega y Gasset, that a country is in decadence when the parts no longer want to be part of the totality. It happened in the Soviet Union, it happened in Spain, it will happen in the States.

Solitude goes wherever you go, traveler.

Let's begin all over again. Let's begin by affirming that poetry has died. And that I'm not a poet. And I'll never, ever be one. I'm not interested in poetry. I don't like life. I detest men. I hate children. I hate the sea.

We were fighting for them in wars against people that we had more in common with than with the United States of Banana.

Look at their hypocrisy. The way they bashed Teddy Kennedy. I always thought that we should throw all the presidential candidates into the Chappaquiddick. With their wives—in cars—drowning. To see which of them would save his wife in order to become the president

It's true that things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.

What is liberty? The measure of dignity.