The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
ROBERTO BOLANOThen 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.
More Roberto Bolano Quotes
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Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
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When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
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You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
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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.
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They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him.
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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.
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If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.
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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.
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Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
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There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
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One should read Borges more.
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Reading is more important than writing.
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I’m an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.
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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.
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we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.
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I’d obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).
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We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
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I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
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Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions.
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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.
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Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.
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For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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