Top 100 Bolano Quotes
#1. Academics always feel that they deserve more. (Roberto Bolano)
Reading and enjoying fine literature is a highly cultivated and refined activity, whereas writing it is everything but so.
(xxx)
Kim Leine
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.
Roberto Bolano
#11. 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
#12. Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers", a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions.
Roberto Bolano
#13. 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
#14. I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
Roberto Bolano
#15. ... where Halder and Hans usually arrived first and had something to eat, perhaps sausage with a bit of sauerkraut.
Roberto Bolano
#16. ... 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
#17. ... 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
#18. 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
#19. There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night.
Roberto Bolano
#20. 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
#21. For a while she thought about becoming a vegetarian. Instead, she took up smoking.
Roberto Bolano
#22. I enjoy vegetarian food like I enjoy a kick in the stomach.
Roberto Bolano
#23. 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
#24. Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.
Roberto Bolano
#25. We interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.
Roberto Bolano
#26. 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
#27. Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
Roberto Bolano
#28. 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
#29. Her eyes like the ideal
geography book:
maps of pure nightmare.
"The Ghost of Edna Lieberman
Roberto Bolano
#30. He asked me when I planned to come back. Always, I said.
Roberto Bolano
#32. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color?
Roberto Bolano
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
Roberto Bolano
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. [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
#48. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.
Roberto Bolano
#53. 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
#54. Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.
Roberto Bolano
#55. What cannot be cannot be, besides which, it is impossible.
Roberto Bolano
#57. 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
#58. His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.
Roberto Bolano
#59. 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
#61. I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.
Roberto Bolano
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?
Roberto Bolano
#66. Madness really is contagious, and friends are a blessing, especially when you're on your own.
Roberto Bolano
#67. What cannot be cannot be, besides witch, it's impossible.
Roberto Bolano
#68. Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.
Roberto Bolano
#69. 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
#70. Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore.
Roberto Bolano
#71. The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight.
Roberto Bolano
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. As you're well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn't make sense otherwise.
Roberto Bolano
#76. Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird.
Roberto Bolano
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.
Roberto Bolano
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don't understand," said San Epifanio.
Roberto Bolano
#86. Her laughter is like a sedative. Then everything falls apart and reassembles itself.
Robert Bolano
#87. Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
Roberto Bolano
#88. 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
#89. A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it, said Espinoza.
Roberto Bolano
#90. We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain
Roberto Bolano
#91. 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
#92. Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari.
Roberto Bolano
#93. The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
Roberto Bolano
#94. Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary.
Roberto Bolano
#95. 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
#96. 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
#98. They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms.
Roberto Bolano
#99. 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
#100. As far as Aricimboldi was concerned, Isou was a 'Romanian fuck-stick.
Roberto Bolano
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