"As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die"
About this Quote
Lorca lands the line with the calm brutality of someone who has stared long enough at fate to stop negotiating with it. The sentence is almost childlike in its grammar, a deliberate stripping down: born, die, worry. That simplicity is the point. He takes the most loaded events a human can name and refuses the usual emotional choreography around them. If you didn’t fret your entrance into the world (because you couldn’t), why perform anxiety about the exit? It’s a piece of logic that feels like a spell: make death smaller by putting it in the same category as birth, an inevitability outside the ego’s jurisdiction.
The subtext is less stoic than it sounds. Lorca isn’t denying fear; he’s challenging the vanity hidden inside it. Worry is a way of imagining we’re protagonists who can bargain with the plot. His line cuts that fantasy, and the result isn’t nihilism so much as a fierce kind of permission: live without the constant administrative dread of mortality.
Context makes the restraint sting. Lorca wrote in a Spain cracking under political violence and accelerating toward civil war; he would be murdered in 1936 by Francoist forces. Read against that horizon, the quote becomes both defiance and tragic premonition. A poet of duende, he understood darkness as an artistic force, not a mood to be cured. The line doesn’t romanticize death; it refuses to let terror be the regime’s final instrument. In a culture where power often demands your fear first, Lorca offers the quietest rebellion: noncompliance.
The subtext is less stoic than it sounds. Lorca isn’t denying fear; he’s challenging the vanity hidden inside it. Worry is a way of imagining we’re protagonists who can bargain with the plot. His line cuts that fantasy, and the result isn’t nihilism so much as a fierce kind of permission: live without the constant administrative dread of mortality.
Context makes the restraint sting. Lorca wrote in a Spain cracking under political violence and accelerating toward civil war; he would be murdered in 1936 by Francoist forces. Read against that horizon, the quote becomes both defiance and tragic premonition. A poet of duende, he understood darkness as an artistic force, not a mood to be cured. The line doesn’t romanticize death; it refuses to let terror be the regime’s final instrument. In a culture where power often demands your fear first, Lorca offers the quietest rebellion: noncompliance.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
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