Nothing is ever behind us.
ROBERTO BOLANOWhen I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
More Roberto Bolano Quotes
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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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The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.
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Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.
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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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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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Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
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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.
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We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
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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.
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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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Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
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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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Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
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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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Reading is more important than writing.
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The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
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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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Literature + Illness = Illness.
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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.
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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.
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In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.
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Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
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Every hundred feet the world changes.
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One should read Borges more.
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In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats
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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