Quotes from Roberto Bolano

La mala educación era para él sinónimo de franqueza y hasta honestidad.

At the time I was living with a Mexican woman and it looked as if the relationship would be the death of her, and me, and the neighbors, and sometimes even the people who ventured to pay us a visit.

y la pesadilla me decía: crecerás. dejarás atrás las imágenes del dolor y del laberinto y olvidarás. pero en aquel tiempo crecer hubiera sido un crimen. estoy aquí, dije, con los perros románticos y aquí me voy a quedar.

but anyways, that's what I was wondering as Alberto's car shot like lightning or crawled like a cockroach, depending on traffic...

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

No, I'm just a poet," said San Epifanio, making room for me. "Poetry is more than enough for me, although sooner or later I'm bound to commit the vulgarity of writing stories.

Nevertheless his work lived on, precariously, desperately (as he would have wished, perhaps), yet it lived on. A handful of young men read it, reinvented him, tried to become his followers, but how can you follow someone who is not moving, someone who is trying, with every appearance of success, to become invisible?

Una risa que me empujaba a salir huyendo de su lado y que al mismo tiempo me proporcionaba la certeza de que no existía ningún lugar adonde pudiera huir.

La pelea fue corta.

Once I asked him what kind of women he liked. It was a stupid question, asked by an adolescent looking for something to say. But the Grub took it seriously and considered his reply for a long time. Finally he said, Calm women. And then he added, But only the dead are really calm. And after a while, Not even the dead, come to think of it.

Soñé que en un cementerio olvidado de áfrica encontraba la tumba de un amigo cuyo rostro ya no podía recordar.

A veces me acuerdo de Laura Damián. No mucho, unas cuatro o cinco veces por día.

To me, her smile is still the terminal smile of that other Mexico, a place sometimes revealed between the folds of a random dawn: part rabid will to live, part sacrifice stone.

In any case, on the wall of Juan Stein's house, there hung a rather ornately framed portrait of Chernyakhovsky, and that, I dare say, incommensurably more important than the busts and the cities named after him and the countless Chernyakhovsky Streets, full of potholes, scattered through the Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania and Russia. I don't know why I've kept the photo, Stein said to us.

A medio hacer, ni crudos ni cocidos, bipolares capaces de cabalgar el huracán.

and for goodness' sake read widely and deeply…

En un oasis uno puede beber, comer, curarse las heridas, descansar, pero si el oasis es de horror, si sólo existen oasis de horror, el viajero podrá confirmar, esta vez de forma fehaciente, que la carne es triste, que llega un día en que todos los libros están leídos y que viajar es un espejismo. Hoy, todo parece indicar que sólo existen oasis de horror o que la deriva de todo oasis es hacia el horror.

in other words near the settlement of El Obelisco, which was neither a village nor exactly a suburb of Santa Teresa, but a way station for the poorest of the poor who came each day from the south, people who slept there at night and even died in hovels that they didn't think of as homes but as one more stop along the road to something different or at least a place where they would be fed.

Allí, el personaje dice ay o empalidece. Como si estuviera dentro de un caleidoscopio y viera el ojo que lo mira. Colores que se ordenan en una geometría ajena a todo lo que tú estás dispuesto a aceptar como bueno.

Then everything turned into a succession of concrete acts and proper nouns and verbs, or pages from an anatomy manual scattered like flower petals, chaotically linked.

where Halder and Hans usually arrived first and had something to eat, perhaps sausage with a bit of sauerkraut.

and he began to read an ordered a sandwich and a beer an paid for them, then he ordered a Fürst Pückler and paid for it because on the terrace one had to pay immediately for anything one had.

Esta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos. No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura. En adelante escribiré mis poemas con humildad y trabajaré para no morirme de hambre y no intentaré publicar.

They told me that Arturo Belano once gave a lecture at the Casa del Lago and when it was his turn to talk he forgot everything. I think the lecture was supposed to be on Chilean poetry and Belano improvised a talk about horror movies.