Roberto Bolaño

“If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.”

“When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.”

“Escucha siempre con atención, Max, las palabras que dicen las mujeres mientras son folladas. Si no hablan, bien, entonces no tienes nada que escuchar y probablemente no tendrás nada que pensar, pero si hablan, aunque sólo sea un murmullo, escucha sus palabras y piensa en ellas, piensa en su significado, piensa en lo que dicen y en lo que no dicen, intenta comprender qué es lo que en realidad quieren decir. Las mujeres son putas asesinas, Max, son monos ateridos de frío que contemplan el horizonte desde un árbol enfermo, son princesas que te buscan en la oscuridad, llorando, indagando las palabras que nunca podrán decir.”

“Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.”

“All horrors are dulled by routine.”

“[...] ter uma idéia do mundo, de certa maneira, é coisa fácil, todo o mundo tem, geralmente uma idéia circunscrita à sua aldeia, limitada ao torrão, às coisas tangíveis e medíocres que cada um tem diante dos olhos, e essa idéia do mundo, mesquinha, limitada, cheia de sebo familiar, costuma sobreviver e adquirir, com o passar do tempo, autoridade e eloqüência.”

“When it left, death didn't even close our eyes.”

“Canetti e creio que também Borges, dois homens tão diferentes, disseram que assim como o mar era o símbolo ou o espelho dos ingleses, o bosque era a metáfora onde viviam os alemães.”

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

“And I thought:History is like a horror story.”

“Leggere è come pensare, come pregare, come parlare con un amico, come esporre le tue idee, come ascoltare le idee degli altri, come ascoltare musica (si, si), come contemplare un paesaggio, come uscire a fare una passeggiata sulla spiaggia.”

“La literatura es una máquina acorazada. No se preocupa de los escritores. A veces ni siquiera se da cuenta de que éstos están vivos. Su enemigo es otro, mucho más grande, mucho más poderoso, y que a la postre la terminará venciendo, pero ésa es otra historia.”

“And no one moans: there is no anguish. Only our nocturnal silence when we crawl on all fours toward the fires that someone has lit for us at a mysterious hour and with incomprehensible finality. We're guided by fate, though we've left nothing to chance. A writer must resemble a censor, our elders told us, and we've followed that marvelous thought to its penultimate consequence. A writer must resemble a newspaper columnist. A writer must resemble a dwarf and MUST survive. If we didn't have to read too, our work would be a point suspended in nothingness, a mandala pared down to a minimum of meaning, our silence, our certainty of standing with one foot dangling on the far side of death. Fantasies. Fantasies. In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats. Castrated cats wedded to cats with slit throats.”

“La literatura se parece mucho a la pelea de los samuráis, pero un samurái no pelea contra otro samurái: pelea contra un monstruo. Generalmente sabe, además, que va a ser derrotado. Tener el valor, sabiendo previamente que vas a ser derrotado, y salir a pelear: eso es la literatura.”

“En aquel tiempo yo tenía veinte años y estaba loco. Había perdido un país pero había ganado un sueño. Y si tenía ese sueño lo demás no importaba.”

“Forget about it," he said. "Sell it to a philosophy quarterly or an urban anthropology journal, or write a fucking script if you want and let Spike Lee shoot the motherfucker, but it's not going to run in any magazine of mine.”

“Among other things, my own experience has led me to believe that American naivete can sometimes be more than it seems; it can hide something we Europeans can't or don't want to understand.”

“When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.”

“Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's 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.”

“Así que todo nos traiciona, incluida la curiosidad y la honestidad y lo que bien amamos. Sí, dijo la voz, pero consuélate, en el fondo es divertido.”

“Lo vi haciendo planes, lo vi bebiendo apoyado en la ventana, lo vi recibiendo a Cesárea Tinajero que venía con una carta de recomendación de Manuel, lo vi leyendo un librito de Tablada, tal vez aquel en donde José Juan dice: "bajo el celeste pavor/ delira por la unica estrella/ el cántico del ruiseñor". Que es como decir, muchachos, les dije, que veía los esfuerzos y los sueños, todos confundidos en un mismo fracaso y ese fracaso se llamaba alegría. - R. Bolaño”

“Hay momentos para recitar poesías y hay momentos para boxear.”

“[Los alumnos de Almafitano aprendieron...]Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y a un espejo. Que no era más cómodo leer que escribir. Que leyendo se aprendía a dudar y a recordar. Que la memoria era el amor.”

“The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.”

“Reading is more important than writing.”

“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.”

“The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight.”

“Everything that begins as comedy ends as a comic monologue, but we aren't laughing anymore.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried...Books are like ghosts”

“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.”

“Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.”

“The town was sunk in a kind of crystal ball; everyone seemed to be asleep (transcendentally asleep!) no matter if they were walking or sitting outside. Around five the sky clouded over and at six it began to rain. The streets cleared all at once. I had the thought that if it was as if autumn had unsheathed a claw and scratched: everything was coming apart. The tourists running on the sidewalks in search of shelter, the shopkeepers pulling tarps over the merchandise displayed in the street, the increasing number of shop windows closed until next summer. Whether I felt pity or scorn when I saw this, I don't know. Detached from any external stimulus, the only thing I could see or feel with any clarity was myself. Everything else had been bombarded by something dark; movie sets consigned to dust and oblivion, as if for good.”

“What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

“Y allí estaba yo. Y ellas me vieron y yo las vi. ¿Y qué fue lo que vi? Ojeras. Labios partidos. Pómulos brillantes. Una paciencia que no me pareció resignación cristiana. Una paciencia como venida de otras latitudes. Una paciencia que no era chilena aunque aquellas mujeres fueran chilenas. Una paciencia que no se había gestado en nuestro país ni en América y que ni siquiera era una paciencia europea, ni asiática ni africana (aunque estas dos últimas culturas me son prácticamente desconocidas). Una paciencia como venida del espacio exterior. Y esa paciencia a punto estuvo de colmar mi paciencia.”

“...y cuando una está feliz o presiente que la felicidad está cerca, pues se mira en los espejos sin ninguna reserva, es más, cuando una está feliz o se siente predestinada a la experiencia de la felicidad, tiene a bajar las defensas y a aceptar los espejos”

“Yo no puedo olvidar nada. Dicen que ]ése es mi problema.”

“Le daría el consejo que nos dábamos los jóvenes infrarrealistas en México. Cuando teníamos 20, 21 años, teníamos un grupo poético, y éramos jóvenes, mal educados y valientes. Nos decíamos: vivir mucho, leer mucho y follar mucho”.”

“Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better”

“The strangest part of the dream,' said Pelletier, 'was the water was alive.”

“…then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep.”

“That night I didn't sleep a wink, said Norton in her letter, and it occurred to me to call Morini. It was late, it was rude to bother him at that hour, it was rash of me, it was a terrible imposition, but I called him. I remember I dialed his number and immediately I turned out the light in the room, as if so long as I was in the dark Morini couldn't see my face. To my surprise, he picked up the phone instantly.”

“When he went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, he thought his features were changing. I look like a gentleman, he said to himself sometimes. I look younger. I look like someone else”

“I remember that a couple, both tall and thin, turned away from a painting and peered over as if I might be an ex-lover or a living (and unfinished) painting that had just got news of the painter's death. I know I walked out without looking back and that I walked for a long time until I realized I wasn't crying, but that it was raining and I was soaked. That night I didn't sleep at all.”

“Everything's over, I thought. I felt rested, I'm home, I have lots to do. When I sat up in bed, though, all I did was start to cry like a fool, for no apparent reason.”

“He turned his face into the stream of water and closed his eyes. I'm not as sad as I'd have thought, he told himself. This is all unreal, he said to himself.”

“And yet your shadow isn't following you anymore. At some point your shadow has quietly slipped away. You pretend you don't notice, but you have, you're missing your fucking shadow, though there are plenty of ways to explain it, the angle of the sun, the degree of oblivion induced by the sun beating down on hatless heads, the quantity of alcohol ingested, the movement of something like subterranean tanks of pain, the fear of more contingent things, a disease that begins to become apparent, wounded vanity, the desire just for once in your life to be on time. But the point is, your shadow is lost and you, momentarily, forget it.”

“His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.”

“But in practice, neither believed in friendship or loyalty. They believed in passion, they believed in a hybrid form of social or public happiness (both voted Socialist, albeit with the occasional abstention), they believed in the possibility of self-realization.”