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 BOLANOSo 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.
More Roberto Bolano Quotes
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When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.
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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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The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.
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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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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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Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.
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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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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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Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
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Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game.
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We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?
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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.
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When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.
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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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The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
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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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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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Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.
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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.
ROBERTO BOLANO