Quotes by Roberto Bolaño

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.

I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.

Listen: I dont have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis thats twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

... the novel, arguably the authors best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and its the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you cant read all day and all night. You cant write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because theyre outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isnt the only thing that matters, time isnt the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

If youre going to say what you want to say, youre going to hear what you dont want to hear.

And finally the two of them plunged into the dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Reiters body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadnt been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the body under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed.

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that shed been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.

The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletiers call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Nortons name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The world euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. The the conversation proceeded more smoothly.

Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didnt. What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense.

“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.”

“Used in a personal sense, the phrase achieve an end seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness.”

“…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasnt really happy.”