Quotes from Roberto Bolano

Life is full of problems, although life was wonderful in Barcelona in those days, and problems were called surprises.

Todos estamos acostumbrados a morirnos cada cierto tiempo y tan poco a poco que la verdad es que cada día estamos más vivos. Infinitamente viejos e infinitamente vivos.

Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers", a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions.

No creo en la literatura como dietario, como diario de vida, como crónica personal; yo creo en la literatura como literatura, como un mecanismo, como una máquina autosuficiente, al menos con una autosuficiencia grande.

Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

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.

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

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

On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geometrico was really three books, 'each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said 'this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections and research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry.

As you're well aware, this is a macho country full of faggots. The history of Mexico wouldn't make sense otherwise.

la relatividad de nuestra memoria que magnifica o empequeñece a discreción, un lenguaje que creemos conocer y que en verdad no conocemos.

Hoy me di cuenta de que lo que escribí ayer en realidad lo escribí hoy: todo lo del treintaiuno de diciembre lo escribí el uno de enero, es decir hoy, y lo que escribí el treinta de diciembre lo escribí el treintaiuno, es decir ayer. Lo que escribo hoy en realidad lo escribo mañana, que para mí será hoy y ayer, y también de alguna manera: un día invisible. Pero sin exagerar.

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!

untill he felt Ingeborg slip two fingers into her vagina and then moisten the entrance to her ass with the same fingers and ask him, no, order, him to penetrate her, sodomize her, right now, immediately, before another moment passed, which Reiter did without thinking twice…

Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books.

La relación entre el padre y el hijo es curiosa. El coronel, eso se nota de inmediato, ama a su hijo por encima de sus deberes como militar, un amor que naturalmente no es correspondido, aún le falta mucho al hijo para comprender al padre, para comprender la soledad, el triste destino al que todos los seres están abocados.

I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week. "Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself. "Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.

The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color?

Charly Cruz asked him if he liked Spike Lee. Yes, said Fate, although he didn't really. "He seems Mexican," said Charly Cruz. "Maybe," said Fate. "That's an interesting way to look at it." "And what about Woody Allen?" "I like him," said Fate. "He seems Mexican too...

Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.

These weren't comforting nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

Who was the first human being to look out a window?

Meanwhile I chain-smoked Bali cigarettes, looking at the window at the highway and thinking about the disaster that was my life.

Used in a personal sense, the phrase 'achieve an end' seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life , and, on rare occasions, happiness .