Quotes from Roberto Bolano

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

... the novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.

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.

If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.

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.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

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

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I'd rather not talk about it, because I didn't understand it.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Every hundred feet the world changes

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?

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

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain

The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

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.

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.

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.