Top 100 Roberto Bolano Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#6. Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.
Roberto Bolano
#7. ... 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
#8. 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
#9. Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.
Roberto Bolano
#10. 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
#11. He asked me when I planned to come back. Always, I said.
Roberto Bolano
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
Roberto Bolano
#18. 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
#21. 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
#22. Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.
Roberto Bolano
#23. 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
#24. His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.
Roberto Bolano
#25. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?
Roberto Bolano
#30. What cannot be cannot be, besides witch, it's impossible.
Roberto Bolano
#31. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.
Roberto Bolano
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. As you're well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn't make sense otherwise.
Roberto Bolano
#36. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird.
Roberto Bolano
#37. I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.
Roberto Bolano
#38. 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
#39. Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio.
Roberto Bolano
#40. 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
#41. A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it, said Espinoza.
Roberto Bolano
#42. We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain
Roberto Bolano
#43. 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
#44. Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari.
Roberto Bolano
#45. The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
Roberto Bolano
#46. Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary.
Roberto Bolano
#47. 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
#48. They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms.
Roberto Bolano
#49. For me, the word "writing" is the exact opposite of the word "waiting". Instead of waiting, there is writing.
Roberto Bolano
#50. Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
Roberto Bolano
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Pain is our only connection with life; only pain can reveal what life is.
Roberto Bolano
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.
Roberto Bolano
#57. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark.
Roberto Bolano
#58. Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of
children tumble into the void.
Roberto Bolano
#59. Tempus breve est, Ora et labora. We aren't given much time on this earth.
Roberto Bolano
#60. Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
Roberto Bolano
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. The strangest part of the dream,' said Pelletier, 'was the water was alive.
Roberto Bolano
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.
Roberto Bolano
#73. When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.
Roberto Bolano
#74. Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world's majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love.
Roberto Bolano
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. Life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.
Roberto Bolano
#82. Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
Roberto Bolano
#83. Mrs Dorothea's typewriter was like a heart, a giant heart beating in the middle of the fog and chaos.
Roberto Bolano
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time.
Roberto Bolano
#87. Who was the first human being to look out a window?
Roberto Bolano
#88. There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.
Roberto Bolano
#89. 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
#90. The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
Roberto Bolano
#91. Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.
Roberto Bolano
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I thought you were dying, said Amalfitano.
"No, I was dreaming," said Castillo.
Roberto Bolano
#96. ... 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
#97. 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
#98. There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Roberto Bolano
#99. 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
#100. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats
Roberto Bolano
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