Roberto Bolaño quotes

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain. (Roberto Bolaño)
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.... (Roberto Bolaño)
Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. 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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Reading is more important than writing. (Roberto Bolaño)
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
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. View quote
Roberto Bolaño
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east. View quote
Roberto Bolaño