Giannina Braschi Quotes

The suicide bomber is an explosion of a contradiction in its paradox, victim and victimizer, yin and yang, two sides of the coin, fire bomb and fire extinguisher, prosecutor and defendant, hangman and hanged.

Nostalgia is a fruit with the pain of distance in its pit.

Only what is fated to die is capable of living. Only what dies lives. Why do you think Christ was killed? They killed him to prove that he wasn’t a god. But in killing him, they immortalized the perishable and transformed man into a god.

I want to take poetry to walk other genres. I want poetry to walk through other genres. When I started writing, this was my main concern: get out of poetry. Let poetry walk the streets of New York. Make her cosmopolitan. See the world. Not in these estrofas, not in these stanzas, which are camisas de fuerza.I have to get out of poetry. I have to do what James Joyce did to the novel: he took the novel out of the novel.

I have just turned life into a proverb. I just killed it.

If you look for an identity you find inequality. If you look for similarities you separate one truth from another.

—Poets and anarchists are always the first to go. —Where. —To the frontline. Wherever it is.

Creation means discovery of a new reality that exists but that has not yet been noticed. The word is alive again. The speaking word. The verbs are in revolt—a revolt of the masses against the representation that has always been the main weapon of the state. (p.121)

Originality is going back to the place where you were what you were—and finding an empty chair. Would you gladly sit on it? No, thank you. It is empty for a reason. That’s where my ass was. Not where my head is now.

English is a language of mass destruction. Lady Macbeth is a queen of mass destruction. Lear is a king of mass destruction. Hamlet is a prince of mass destruction. Shakespeare is a bard of mass destruction. And Moby Dick is a whale of mass destruction.

Gods are condemned to live the dream of the imperishable.

Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion. (p.8)

Intuition is the positive energy that envy kills when it refuses to see the rainbow in the sky.

You cannot measure IQ through poetry.

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