Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn’t clear, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
ROBERTO BOLANOI 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.
More Roberto Bolano Quotes
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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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Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
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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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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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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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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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The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
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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.
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Every hundred feet the world changes.
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The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
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Literature + Illness = Illness.
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we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.
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Reading is more important than writing.
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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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Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
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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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There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
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We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
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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.
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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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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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For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.
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Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
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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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In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats
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I’m an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.
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