Wit & Attitude Quote by Federico Garcia Lorca

Lorca walks into modernity and immediately clocks the trick: New York’s seduction is inseparable from its violence. “Something awful, something monstrous” isn’t tourist-shock; it’s a poet recognizing scale as a moral problem. The line turns the skyline into a creature. Even “I like to walk the streets, lost” carries a double charge: the city grants anonymity (a kind of freedom, especially for an outsider), but that same vastness erases people into background noise.

Calling New York “the world’s greatest lie” is Lorca’s most surgical move. The lie isn’t that the city is fake; it’s that it sells itself as destiny. In late-1920s Manhattan - amid finance, speed, crowds, spectacle - the promise of progress masks a brutal arithmetic of labor and dispossession. Lorca, arriving from Spain and writing what became Poet in New York, is watching capitalism perform as myth: lights as transcendence, consumption as meaning.

“New York is Senegal with machines” lands like a moral slap. It’s deliberately abrasive, collapsing the polished metropolis into the logic of extraction and colonial hierarchy. He isn’t making a geographic comparison so much as exposing a structure: racialized bodies and distant suffering feeding the “machine” of the modern city. The phrase also implicates the reader’s taste for the city’s glamour. If New York runs on unseen lives, then its sophistication is just a well-designed alibi.

The genius here is Lorca’s refusal to choose between enchantment and indictment. He lets the city keep its hypnotic pull while insisting that the pull itself is part of the con.