Quotes from Roberto Bolano

I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors.

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.

Se puede conquistar a una muchacha con un poema, pero no se la puede retener con un poema. Vaya, ni siquiera con un movimiento poético.

Toda vida, le dijo esa noche Epifanio a Lalo Cura, por más feliz que sea, acaba siempre en dolor y sufrimiento. Depende, dijo Lalo Cura. ¿Depende de qué, buey? De muchas cosas, dijo Lalo Cura. Si te pegan un balazo en la nuca, por ejemplo, y el pinche asesino se acerca sin que lo escuches, te vas al otro mundo sin dolor y sin sufrimiento. Pinche escuincle, dijo Epifanio. ¿A ti han pegado muchos tiros en la nuca?

Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari.

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.

He] turned his back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window any more and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room flickering, it appeared.

He also discovered that he was bitter and full of resentment, that he oozed resentment, and that he might easily kill someone, anyone, if it would provide a respite from the loneliness and rain and cold of Madrid, but this was a discovery that he preferred to conceal.

This is where the story should end, but life is not as kind as literature.

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 (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

no biography of his existed in German even though sales of his books were rising in Germany as well as the rest of Europe and even in the United States, which likes vanished writers (vanished writers or millionaire writers) or the legend of vanished writers…

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

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a great writer and son of a bitch. Just an abject human being. It's incredible that the coldest moments of his abjection are covered under an aura of nobility, which is only attributable to the power of words.

When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down .

As far as Popescu was concerned, meanwhile, Dracula was simply a Romanian patriot who had resisted the Turks, a deed for which every European nation should to some degree be grateful. History is cruel, said Popescu, cruel and paradoxical: the man who halts the conquering onslaught of the Turks is transformed, thanks to a second-rate English writer, into a monster, a libertine whose sole interest is human blood, when the truth is that the only blood Tepes cared to spill was Turkish.

dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed)…

Leer es aprender a morir, pero también es aprender a ser feliz, a ser valiente.

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.

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.

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

For a while she thought about becoming a vegetarian. Instead, she took up smoking.

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

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

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