Top 70 Quotes & Sayings by Roberto Bolano
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
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.
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.
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.
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.
Only in chaos are we conceivable.
I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.
Nothing is ever behind us.
You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.
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.
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?
No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
What twisted people we are. How simple we seem, or at least pretend to be in front of others, and how twisted we are deep down. How paltry we are and how spectacularly we contort ourselves before our own eyes, and the eyes of others...And all for what? To hide what? To make people believe what?
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
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.
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.
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats
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.
The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
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.
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.
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
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.
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.
The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.
I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.
If life is misery, why do we endure it?
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.
In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.
Literature + Illness = Illness
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.
Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
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).
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.
Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
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.
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.
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.
…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 wasn't really happy.
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.
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.
Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.
Reading is more important than writing.
Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.
Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
Every hundred feet the world changes
Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.
They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.
There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
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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