Roberto Bolano Quotes

One of the inconveniences of stealing books - especially for a novice like myself - is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.

All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.

Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world's majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love.

Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us.

And then the storm of shit begins.

There are silences made just for us.

People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

What begins as comedy ends as a triumphal march, wouldn't you say?

Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.

According to Dieter Hellfeld, a member of the Swedish Academy

Reading is more important than writing.

He said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown.

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

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.

I enjoy vegetarian food like I enjoy a kick in the stomach.

Philip K. Dick died
and now we only need
what is strictly necessary.

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.

Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand.

As you're well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn't make sense otherwise.

I've been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

Dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering ...

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

68. By then all poets will live in artistic communities calls jails or asylums. 69. Our imaginary home, the home we share.

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

All horrors are dulled by routine.

Once again reality has proved that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance.

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

Posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats ...

One day I'll die of cancer.

It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?

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.

The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty dance club.

If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.

Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?

Above the street, like a hanged man, swings the spot-lit sign of the neighborhood's best restaurant, closed a long time ago.

Nothing is ever behind us.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

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.

Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you're on your own.

With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.

It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable.

Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

Images,wounds. That is all he can see. And the images are dissolving little by little, like the setting sun, leaving only the wounds.

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

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.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

And quick strokes of other less intimate adventures
Flashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him ...

Among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face.

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths ...

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.

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.

Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.

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.

A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it, said Espinoza.

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.

Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari.

Only poetry isn't shit.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

Mrs Dorothea's typewriter was like a heart, a giant heart beating in the middle of the fog and chaos.

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom!

There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night.

Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore.

I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

Her eyes like the ideal
geography book:
maps of pure nightmare.

"The Ghost of Edna Lieberman

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends.

We interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

What cannot be cannot be, besides witch, it's impossible.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Reading is never a waste of time.

I thought you were dying, said Amalfitano.
"No, I was dreaming," said Castillo.

They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms.

We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?

When it left, death didn't even close our eyes.

That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave.

Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio.

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.

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.

The novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.

Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark.

One should read Borges more.

Silence hovers in the yards, leaving no pages with writing on them, that thing we'll later call the work.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

I hope you die, I said. I hope I die, he said, and then he said: I know I'm going to die.

The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight.

Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.