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I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way. -- Roberto Bolano
So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end. -- Roberto Bolano
Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world's majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love. -- Roberto Bolano
I remember scrutinizing his face. I remember drinking his face down to the last drop, trying to elucidate the character, the psychology of such an individual. And yet the only thing about him that has remained is my memory of his ugliness. -- Roberto Bolano
Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they'd been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us. -- Roberto Bolano
In other words: Allende's work is bad, but it's alive; it's anaemic, like a lot of Latin Americans, but it's alive. It won't live long, like many sick people, but for now it's alive. And there's always the possibility of a miracle. -- Roberto Bolano
One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions, and that includes one's words and silences, yes, one's silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences. -- Roberto Bolano
54. The children of the Spanish lion, said Ruben Dario, a born optimist. The children of Walt Whitman, Jose Marti, and Violeta Parra; torn apart, forgotten, in mass graves, at the bottom of the sea, the Trojan destiny of their mingled bones terrifying the survivors. -- Roberto Bolano
One of the inconveniences of stealing books - especially for a novice like myself - is that sometimes you have to take what you can get. -- Roberto Bolano
I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage. -- Roberto Bolano
Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer. -- Roberto Bolano
For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but suddenly, before he said anything, I realized that I'd be the one who cried, that inevitably, it would be me who cried. -- Roberto Bolano
... I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy. -- Roberto Bolano
That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.'
It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing. -- Roberto Bolano
I don't have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don't have much time, I have to breath, eat, drink, sleep. I don't have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don't have much time, I'm busy living. I don't have much time, I'm busy dying. -- Roberto Bolano
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive. -- Roberto Bolano
The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. -- Roberto Bolano
To Amalfitano, Jordi seemed a shy and formal boy. Rosa liked his silence, which she mistook for thoughtfulness when it was really just a symptom of the confusion raging in his head. -- Roberto Bolano
Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer. -- Roberto Bolano
A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it, said Espinoza. -- Roberto Bolano
A badulaque," said Espinoza, "is someone of no consequence. It's a word that can also be applied to fools, but there are fools of consequence, and badulaque applies only to fools of no consequence. -- Roberto Bolano
These weren't comforting nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave. -- Roberto Bolano
I am being followed, I realized, with a blend of certitude and astonishment, like a soldier discovering that gangrene has taken hold of his leg. -- Roberto Bolano
Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be. -- Roberto Bolano
Tempus breve est, Ora et labora. We aren't given much time on this earth. -- Roberto Bolano
Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery. -- Roberto Bolano
The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less. -- Roberto Bolano
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom! -- Roberto Bolano
I began to tremble and he noticed. Why do I have to like the worst ones? I thought, why do I have to be attracted to the most brooding, least cultured, most desperate ones? It's a question I ask myself twice a year. I still haven't found an answer. -- Roberto Bolano
When he went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, he thought his features were changing. I look like a gentleman, he said to himself sometimes. I look younger. I look like someone else -- Roberto Bolano
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach. -- Roberto Bolano
So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely. -- Roberto Bolano
The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color? -- Roberto Bolano
And I thought:History is like a horror story. -- Roberto Bolano
Sometimes I get the sense that it's all "internal" ... Maybe that's why I lived alone and did nothing for three years ... (The man hardly ever washed, he didn't need a typewriter, all he had to do was sit in that shabby armchair for things to flee of their own accord) -- Roberto Bolano
Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us. -- Roberto Bolano
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at. -- Roberto Bolano
I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell. -- Roberto Bolano
They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack. Anyway, they must be saying things like how was your day, I'm tired, there's an avocado sandwich in the kitchen, thanks, thanks, a beer in the refrigerator. -- Roberto Bolano
Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost. -- Roberto Bolano
For a moment the two of them looked at each other, wordless, as if they were asleep and their dreams had converged on common ground, a place where sound was alien. -- Roberto Bolano
History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness. -- Roberto Bolano
The borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics. -- Roberto Bolano
... untill he felt Ingeborg slip two fingers into her vagina and then moisten the entrance to her ass with the same fingers and ask him, no, order, him to penetrate her, sodomize her, right now, immediately, before another moment passed, which Reiter did without thinking twice ... -- Roberto Bolano
We had contributed. So had his mother and all the other black mothers who wept at night and saw visions of the gates of hell when they should have been asleep. -- Roberto Bolano
He didn't like the earth, much less forests. He didn't like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. -- Roberto Bolano
This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published. -- Roberto Bolano
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me. -- Roberto Bolano
There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter. -- Roberto Bolano
I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week.
"Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself.
"Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be. -- Roberto Bolano
I possessed only a book, which I carried in my small backpack. Suddenly, while I was walking, the book began to burn. Dawn was breaking and almost no cars passed. While throwing the charred backpack in an irrigation ditch I felt my back sting as though I had wings. -- Roberto Bolano
He asked me when I planned to come back. Always, I said. -- Roberto Bolano
That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. -- Roberto Bolano
Only in chaos are we conceivable. -- Roberto Bolano
You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for. -- Roberto Bolano
In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet. -- Roberto Bolano
Used in a personal sense, the phrase 'achieve an end' seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. -- Roberto Bolano
We play at believing ourselves imortal. We delude oursleves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell. -- Roberto Bolano
Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight. -- Roberto Bolano
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats -- Roberto Bolano
It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour? -- Roberto Bolano
Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird. -- Roberto Bolano
All horrors are dulled by routine. -- Roberto Bolano
As you're well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn't make sense otherwise. -- Roberto Bolano
The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight. -- Roberto Bolano
Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore. -- Roberto Bolano
Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises. -- Roberto Bolano
What cannot be cannot be, besides witch, it's impossible. -- Roberto Bolano
Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you're on your own. -- Roberto Bolano
When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and--the crowning touch-- a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. -- Roberto Bolano
What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others ... And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what? -- Roberto Bolano
At that moment, in spite of the dizziness, I felt like Nietzsche when he had his Eternal Return epiphany. An inexorable succession of nanoseconds, each one blessed by eternity. -- Roberto Bolano
I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men. -- Roberto Bolano
If life is misery, why do we endure it? -- Roberto Bolano
I suppose all the movies I've seen will be worth nothing to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be worth something, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies. -- Roberto Bolano
His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why. -- Roberto Bolano
Which is to say, boys, that I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy. -- Roberto Bolano
Happy are those who own nothing. -- Roberto Bolano
What cannot be cannot be, besides which, it is impossible. -- Roberto Bolano
Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books. -- Roberto Bolano
This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it's incomplete, because stories like this don't have an ending. -- Roberto Bolano
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it. -- Roberto Bolano
For me, the word "writing" is the exact opposite of the word "waiting". Instead of waiting, there is writing. -- Roberto Bolano
As far as Aricimboldi was concerned, Isou was a 'Romanian fuck-stick. -- Roberto Bolano
No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she'd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance. -- Roberto Bolano
They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms. -- Roberto Bolano
Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it. -- Roberto Bolano
Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary. -- Roberto Bolano
The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune. -- Roberto Bolano
Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari. -- Roberto Bolano
These days there's no time to be bored, happiness has vanished somewhere in the world, and all that's left is dismay. -- Roberto Bolano
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain -- Roberto Bolano
Charly Cruz asked him if he liked Spike Lee. Yes, said Fate, although he didn't really.
"He seems Mexican," said Charly Cruz.
"Maybe," said Fate. "That's an interesting way to look at it."
"And what about Woody Allen?"
"I like him," said Fate.
"He seems Mexican too ... -- Roberto Bolano
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east. -- Roberto Bolano
Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio. -- Roberto Bolano
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain. -- Roberto Bolano
Nothing is ever behind us. -- Roberto Bolano
I am dying now, but I still have many things to say. -- Roberto Bolano
Among other things, my own experience has led me to believe that American naivete can sometimes be more than it seems; it can hide something we Europeans can't or don't want to understand. -- Roberto Bolano
And then the storm of shit begins. -- Roberto Bolano
... where Halder and Hans usually arrived first and had something to eat, perhaps sausage with a bit of sauerkraut. -- Roberto Bolano
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game. -- Roberto Bolano
Everything's over, I thought. I felt rested, I'm home, I have lots to do. When I sat up in bed, though, all I did was start to cry like a fool, for no apparent reason. -- Roberto Bolano
We interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation. -- Roberto Bolano
Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it. -- Roberto Bolano
When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process. -- Roberto Bolano
I enjoy vegetarian food like I enjoy a kick in the stomach. -- Roberto Bolano
For a while she thought about becoming a vegetarian. Instead, she took up smoking. -- Roberto Bolano
There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night. -- Roberto Bolano
... dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed) ... -- Roberto Bolano
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear. -- Roberto Bolano
If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion. -- Roberto Bolano
Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers", a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions. -- Roberto Bolano
It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable. -- Roberto Bolano
The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life. -- Roberto Bolano
To sum up, as Bibiano said, quoting Parra: that's how it goes, the glory of the world; no world, no glory, not even a miserable mortadella sandwich -- Roberto Bolano
Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. -- Roberto Bolano
Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore. -- Roberto Bolano
[He] turned his back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window any more and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room flickering, it appeared. -- Roberto Bolano
Above the street, like a hanged man, swings the spot-lit sign of the neighborhood's best restaurant, closed a long time ago. -- Roberto Bolano
Poetry and prison have always been neighbors. -- Roberto Bolano
With the innocence of the dead, who no longer mind being observed, the people in the photographs gazed out on the professors' barely contained enthusiasm. -- Roberto Bolano
No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. -- Roberto Bolano
There were the usual deaths, yes, those to be expected, people who started off celebrating and ended up killing each other, uncinematic deaths, deaths from the realm of folklore, not modernity: deaths that didn't scare anybody. -- Roberto Bolano
You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement. -- Roberto Bolano
I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love. -- Roberto Bolano
If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war. -- Roberto Bolano
He turned his face into the stream of water and closed his eyes. I'm not as sad as I'd have thought, he told himself. This is all unreal, he said to himself. -- Roberto Bolano
One is prepared for friendship, not for friends. -- Roberto Bolano
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar. -- Roberto Bolano
Her eyes like the ideal
geography book:
maps of pure nightmare.
"The Ghost of Edna Lieberman -- Roberto Bolano
A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy. -- Roberto Bolano
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. -- Roberto Bolano
Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark. -- Roberto Bolano
I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin.
"That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously. -- Roberto Bolano
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths ... -- Roberto Bolano
Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore? -- Roberto Bolano
The night was dark as pitch or coal. Stupid expressions, thought Pereda. European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there's nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below. -- Roberto Bolano
Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. -- Roberto Bolano
With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility. -- Roberto Bolano
Those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon. -- Roberto Bolano
Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand. -- Roberto Bolano
It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense, heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-on earth, which is a thin smell, and smell like Chorda filum.
2666, Bolano -- Roberto Bolano
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we? -- Roberto Bolano
Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage. -- Roberto Bolano
I thought you were dying, said Amalfitano.
"No, I was dreaming," said Castillo. -- Roberto Bolano
But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie. -- Roberto Bolano
I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate and silverware, brushed away the crumbs and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light. -- Roberto Bolano
Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore. -- Roberto Bolano
God and chance belonged to art, eternity and labyrinths to science. -- Roberto Bolano
Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers. -- Roberto Bolano
Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm. -- Roberto Bolano
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them. -- Roberto Bolano
Mrs Dorothea's typewriter was like a heart, a giant heart beating in the middle of the fog and chaos. -- Roberto Bolano
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower. -- Roberto Bolano
What begins as comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn't you say? -- Roberto Bolano
They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him ... -- Roberto Bolano
Dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering ... -- Roberto Bolano
I dreamt that Earth was finished. And the only
human being to contemplate the end was Franz
Kafka. In heaven, the Titans were fighting to the
death. From a wrought-iron seat in Central Park,
Kafka was watching the world burn. -- Roberto Bolano
Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of
children tumble into the void. -- Roberto Bolano
Right now you can cry and let your image dissolve
on the windshields of cars parked along
the Boardwalk. But you can't lose yourself. -- Roberto Bolano
... then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep. -- Roberto Bolano
One should read Borges more. -- Roberto Bolano
When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow. -- Roberto Bolano
... no biography of his existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers ... -- Roberto Bolano
Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age. -- Roberto Bolano
But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization. -- Roberto Bolano
Images,wounds. That is all he can see. And the images are dissolving little by little, like the setting sun, leaving only the wounds. -- Roberto Bolano
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a writer. -- Roberto Bolano
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. -- Roberto Bolano
Who was the first human being to look out a window? -- Roberto Bolano
Is that the true, the supreme terror, to discover that I am the wizened youth whose cries no one can hear? -- Roberto Bolano
If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone. -- Roberto Bolano
He said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown. -- Roberto Bolano
The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty dance club. -- Roberto Bolano
Her silence wasn't unpleasant, not did it imply resentment or sadness. It was transparent, not dense. It took up almost no space. -- Roberto Bolano
People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth. -- Roberto Bolano
The strangest part of the dream,' said Pelletier, 'was the water was alive. -- Roberto Bolano
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better -- Roberto Bolano
According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the Swedish Academy -- Roberto Bolano
Being alone makes us stronger. That's the honest truth. But it's cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore. -- Roberto Bolano
I'd love her until the end of time, he thought. An hour later he'd already forgotten the matter completely. -- Roberto Bolano
Posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats ... -- Roberto Bolano
Said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our -- Roberto Bolano
Philip K. Dick died
and now we only need
what is strictly necessary. -- Roberto Bolano
At the time I was living with a Mexican woman and it looked as if the relationship would be the death of her, and me, and the neighbors, and sometimes even the people who ventured to pay us a visit. -- Roberto Bolano
Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point thiw was what he believed ... -- Roberto Bolano
Only poetry isn't shit. -- Roberto Bolano
I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed. -- Roberto Bolano
Once again reality has proved that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance. -- Roberto Bolano
I hope you die, I said. I hope I die, he said, and then he said: I know I'm going to die. -- Roberto Bolano
Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books. -- Roberto Bolano
Among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face. -- Roberto Bolano
And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time. -- Roberto Bolano
Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears. -- Roberto Bolano
There are silences made just for us. -- Roberto Bolano
The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black. -- Roberto Bolano
Reading is more important than writing. -- Roberto Bolano
Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. -- Roberto Bolano
The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all. -- Roberto Bolano
The novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile. -- Roberto Bolano
Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we'll later call the work. -- Roberto Bolano
He also discovered that he was bitter and full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and cold of Madrid, but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal. -- Roberto Bolano
That was when I realized I was leaving my footprints all around the room. The soles of my feet were covered with blood. While continuing to move around, I carefully examined the prints. Suddenly I felt like laughing. They were dance steps. The footprints of St. Vitus. Footprints leading nowhere. -- Roberto Bolano
Life, or the specter of life, is constantly challenging us for acts we've never committed. And sometimes for acts we never even thought of committing. -- Roberto Bolano
And quick strokes of other less intimate adventures
Flashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies. -- Roberto Bolano
I prefer to not say anything, she wrote, there's no point adding to the pain, or adding our own little mysteries to it. As if the pain itself were not enough of a mystery, as if the pain were not the (mysterious) answer to all mysteries. -- Roberto Bolano
Pain is our only connection with life; only pain can reveal what life is. -- Roberto Bolano
There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California. -- Roberto Bolano
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads. -- Roberto Bolano
The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. -- Roberto Bolano
I preferred not to respond. (Although several replies occurred to me.) -- Roberto Bolano
Every hundred feet the world changes -- Roberto Bolano
You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims. -- Roberto Bolano
One day I'll die of cancer. -- Roberto Bolano
It would be interesting to remember the dreams I had here, at the Del Mar, more than ten years ago. I probably dreamed about girls and punishment, the way all boys that age do. -- Roberto Bolano
68. By then all poets will live in artistic communities calls jails or asylums. 69. Our imaginary home, the home we share. -- Roberto Bolano
It was the tyrannical, slightly stupid thing you say after you've made love. -- Roberto Bolano
Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine. -- Roberto Bolano
When it left, death didn't even close our eyes. -- Roberto Bolano
Reading is never a waste of time. -- Roberto Bolano
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing. -- Roberto Bolano
I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones. -- Roberto Bolano
Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured. -- Roberto Bolano
Life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth. -- Roberto Bolano
We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive. -- Roberto Bolano
I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions. -- Roberto Bolano
Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led. -- Roberto Bolano