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Top Roberto Bolano Quotes

Browse top 158 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Roberto Bolano.

Favorite Roberto Bolano Quotes

1. "If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone." ~ Roberto Bolano
2. "We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain." ~ Roberto Bolano
3. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
4. "Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing." ~ Roberto Bolaño
5. "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?" ~ Roberto Bolaño
6. "I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions." ~ Roberto Bolaño
7. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
8. "Once again reality has proved that no particular group has a monopoly over demagogy, dogmatism, and ignorance." ~ Roberto Bolaño
9. "Marchand dreams that in one magical and endless night the rejected manuscripts make love every way possible with his abandoned manuscript: they sodomize it, rape it orally and genitally, come in its hair, on its body, in its ears, in its armpits, etc., but when morning comes, his manuscript hasn't been fertilized. It's sterile. In that sterility, Marchand believes, lies its uniqueness, its magnetism." ~ Roberto Bolaño
10. "Reality is an AIDS-riddled whore." ~ Roberto Bolaño
11. "One should read Borges more." ~ Roberto Bolaño
12. "Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines." ~ Roberto Bolaño
13. "I'm seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I'm in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I'm an orphan, and someday I'll be a lawyer. That's what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night." ~ Roberto Bolaño
14. "Durante un rato contemplé la máquina de escribir, el libro en donde estaban anotadas las visitas, un recipiente de madera lleno de lápices, clips y gomas de borrar que parecían estar en perfecto orden, lo que me pareció imposible pues nadie en su sano juicio ordena clips (lápices y gomas, sí, pero no clips) [...]" ~ Roberto Bolaño
15. "While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found." ~ Roberto Bolaño
16. "Artaud decía que escribir era una marranada, que todos los escritores eran unos cerdos, sobre todo los de ahora. Lo suscribo. Sin embargo, pese a todo, continúo admirando a los jóvenes escritores. De la misma forma que admiro a los jóvenes boxeadores" ~ Roberto Bolaño
17. "Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I'm building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn't have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn't have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn't have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I'm willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy." ~ Roberto Bolaño
18. "Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost." ~ Roberto Bolaño
19. "said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our" ~ Roberto Bolaño
20. "They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him...." ~ Roberto Bolaño
21. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
22. "The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune." ~ Roberto Bolaño
23. "You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims." ~ Roberto Bolaño
24. "I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin. "That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her reading seriously." ~ Roberto Bolaño
25. "Supe entonces, con humildad, con perplejidad, en un arranque de mexicanidad absoluta, que estábamos gobernados por el azar y que en esa tormenta todos nos ahogaríamos, y supe que sólo los más astutos, no yo ciertamente, iban a mantenerse a flote un poco más de tiempo." ~ Roberto Bolaño
26. "Only poetry isn't shit." ~ Roberto Bolaño
27. "That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.'It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing." ~ Roberto Bolaño
28. "The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too." ~ Roberto Bolaño
29. "Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today: everything from December 31 I wrote on January 1, i.e. today, and what I wrote on December 30 I wrote on the 31st, i.e. yesterday. What I write today I'm really writing tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day. But enough of that." ~ Roberto Bolaño
30. "[...] 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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
31. "…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy." ~ Roberto Bolaño
32. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
33. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
34. "Compreendo o senhor, disse Marco Antonio Guerra. Quero dizer, se não me engano, creio que o compreendo. O senhor é como eu e eu sou como o senhor. Não estamos à vontade. Vivemos num ambiente que nos asfixia. Fazemos como se não acontecesse nada, mas acontece sim. O que acontece? Nos asfixiamos, caralho. O senhor se desafoga como pode." ~ Roberto Bolaño
35. "In a word, and bluntly: as they walked around Sankt Pauli, it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis's house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war." ~ Roberto Bolaño
36. "When it left, death didn't even close our eyes." ~ Roberto Bolaño
37. "Her eyes like the idealgeography book:maps of pure nightmare."The Ghost of Edna Lieberman" ~ Roberto Bolaño
38. "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" ~ Roberto Bolaño
39. "I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage." ~ Roberto Bolaño
40. "Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies." ~ Roberto Bolaño
41. "Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos." ~ Roberto Bolaño
42. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
43. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
44. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
45. "With the innocence of the dead, who no longer mind being observed, the people in the photographs gazed out on the professors' barely contained enthusiasm." ~ Roberto Bolaño
46. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
47. "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." ~ Roberto Bolaño
48. "I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones." ~ Roberto Bolaño
49. "The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower." ~ Roberto Bolaño
50. "A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy." ~ Roberto Bolaño
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So we show up on her porch out of the blue, kidnap her, feed her frozen fruit and ask her on a date. Genius"
Author: Aprilynne Pike

What Did Roberto Bolaño Talk About?

Con
Wit
Thin
Ear
End
Lit
Hen
Era
Per
Los
Here
Read
Thou
Lie
Hey
Ten
Though
Use
Tan
Die
She
Once
Old
Said
Sin
Book
King
Boo
Ally
Pen
Less
Son
Mad
Bee
Each
Ears
Yes
Sea
Air
Ours
Cause
Reading
Story
Word
Self
Eye
Tie
Low
Turn
Hit

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