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

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

Alive Death End Gradual Infinite
Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Contamination Game Poetry
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Art Decision Point Truth
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Construction Knowledge Pleasure Reading Verbal
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

Curiosity End Fun Honesty Voice
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

Dreams Fingers Thinking Touching
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Assume Lose Sea Water
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

Approach Edge Friendship Love Nerve
Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Blood Literature Product Strange
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

Art Lying Ourselves Realize
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

Alien Each Other Moments Place Sound
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Myself Return Traveling
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

Friendship People Prayer Reading Thinking View Walk
We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
ROBERTO BOLANO

Artist Goodness Hide Job
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

Human Illusion Struggle Survive Swallow Time
Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Death Passage Reality Tradition
No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Attention Hide Kill Oneself Pay Secret
Literature + Illness = Illness.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Illness Literature
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats
ROBERTO BOLANO

Ability Goal Lost Potential Tiger
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

Body Bone Death Sorrow Yourself
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

Children Grow Up Life Philosophy Stop Truth
If life is misery, why do we endure it?
ROBERTO BOLANO

Endurance Life Misery
You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Known Yourself
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).
ROBERTO BOLANO

Group Ignorance Myself Reading World
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

Arrest Myself Retard Thinking
Every hundred feet the world changes.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Change Travel World
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
ROBERTO BOLANO

Color Dance Night

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

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

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