Roberto Bolaño

“Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point thiw was what he believed...”

“I'd love her until the end of time, he thought. An hour later he'd already forgotten the matter completely.”

“The University of Santa Teresa was like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain. It also was like an empty dance club.”

“It was the tyrannical, slightly stupid thing you say after you've made love.”

“I began to tremble and he noticed. Why do I have to like the worst ones? I thought, why do I have to be attracted to the most brooding, least cultured, most desperate ones? It's a question I ask myself twice a year. I still haven't found an answer.”

“You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.”

“Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.”

“A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.”

“I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin. "That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously.”

“These days there's no time to be bored, happiness has vanished somewhere in the world, and all that's left is dismay.”

“I am being followed, I realized, with a blend of certitude and astonishment, like a soldier discovering that gangrene has taken hold of his leg.”

“Ulazim u njihove snove. Ulazim u njihove najsramnije misli, u svakom sam drhtaju, u svakom grču njihovih duša, uvlačim se u njihova srca, ispipavam njihove najtemeljnije predodžbe, motrim njihove bezumne porive, njihova neizraziva čuvstva, spavam u njihovim plućima ljeti i u njihovim mišićima zimi, i sve to činim bez i najmanjeg napora, ne zahtijevajući to, ne moleći ni tražeći, bez ikakve prisile, nagnan samo predanošću i ljubavlju.”

“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.”

“[...] experimentaram o que era estar num purgatório, uma longa espera inerme, uma espera cuja coluna vertebral era o desamparo, coisa muito latino-americana, aliás, uma sensação familiar, uma coisa que se você pensasse bem experimentava todos os dias, mas sem angústia, sem a sombra da morte sobrevoando o bairro como um bando de urubus e espessando tudo, subvertendo a rotina de tudo, pondo todas as coisas de pernas para o ar.”

“Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.”

“Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”

“...the borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics.”

“As metáfora são a maneira de nos perdermos nas aparências ou de ficarmos imóveis no mar das aparências. Nesse sentido, uma metáfora é como um salva-vidas. E não se deve esquecer que há salva-vidas que boiam e salva-vidas que vão direto para o fundo. É bom nunca esquecer isso.”

“Compreendo o senhor, disse Marco Antonio Guerra. Quero dizer, se não me engano, creio que o compreendo. O senhor é como eu e eu sou como o senhor. Não estamos à vontade. Vivemos num ambiente que nos asfixia. Fazemos como se não acontecesse nada, mas acontece sim. O que acontece? Nos asfixiamos, caralho. O senhor se desafoga como pode.”

“Tentou dizer alguma coisa num par de ocasiões, mas não conseguiu, o silêncio dela, porém, não era desagradável nem implicava rancor ou tristeza. Não era denso mas transparente. Quase não ocupava espaço. Inclusive, pensou Espinoza, você poderia se acostumar a esse silêncio e ser feliz. Mas ele não se acostumaria nunca, isso ele também sabia.”

“Happy are those who own nothing.”

“[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.”

“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 can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...”

“He said that the only decent German philosopher was Lichtenberg, who was less a philosopher than the ultimate jokester and clown.”

“As far as Aricimboldi was concerned, Isou was a 'Romanian fuck-stick.”

“Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes, his manuscript hasn't been fertilized. It's sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism.”

“For Padilla the shared act of smoking was basically a staging of loneliness: the tough guys, the talkers, the quick to forget and the long to remember, lost themselves for an instant, the length of time it took the cigarette to burn, an instant in which time was frozen and yet all times in Spanish history were concentrated, all the cruelty and the broken dreams, and in that "night of the soul" the smokers recognized each other, unsurprised, and embraced. The spirals of smoke were the embrace.”

“When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bolshevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and--the crowning touch-- a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor.”

“The Russians opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers the Germans used for other purposes they seized his tongue and yanked. The pain made tears spring to his eyes and he said, or rather shouted, the word coño, cunt. With the pliers in his mouth the exclamation was transformed, coming out as the word kunst. The Russian who spoke German stared at him in surprise. The Sevillan shouted Kunst, Kunst, and wept in pain. The word Kunst, in German, means art, and that was how the bilingual soldier heard it and he said that the son of a bitch was an artist or something. The soldiers who were torturing the Sevillan removed the pliers along with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery. Art. The thing that soothes wild beasts.”

“I thought you were dying, said Amalfitano."No, I was dreaming," said Castillo.”

“Hard cocks, with glorious exceptions, were hardly ever literary.”

“... dizzied, thrilled, depressed by remembering...”

“According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next.”

“Right now you can cry and let your image dissolveon the windshields of cars parked along the Boardwalk. But you can't lose yourself.”

“Brief like beauty,Absolute beauty,That which contains all the world's majesty and miseryAnd which is only visible to those who love.”

“And quick strokes of other less intimate adventuresFlashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies.”

“I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the Donizetti, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are...”

“With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.”

“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”

“Demasiado bonito para que durara, ya saben, los espíritus singulares no soportan tanto amor, tanta perfección encontrada por casualidad”

“God and chance belonged to art, eternity and labyrinths to science.”

“This story is very simple, although it could have been very complicated. Also, it's incomplete, because stories like this don't have an ending.”

“Which is to say, boys, that I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.”

“There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night.”

“Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore.”

“... among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face.”

“I suppose all the movies I've seen will be worth nothing to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be worth something, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies.”

“It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?”

“Above the street, like a hanged man, swings the spot-lit sign of the neighborhood's best restaurant, closed a long time ago.”

“A leitura é prazer e alegria de estar vivo ou tristeza de estar vivo, e sobretudo é conhecimento de perguntas. [...] É necessário haver muitos livros, muitos pinheiros enfeitiçantes, para que velem de olhares avessos o livro que realmente importa, a porra da gruta da nossa desgraça, a flor mágica do inverno!”