Roberto Bolaño Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

Roberto Bolaño
The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.

Roberto Bolaño
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 Bolaño
Thus we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

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

Roberto Bolaño
Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

Roberto Bolaño
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
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

Roberto Bolaño
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats.

Roberto Bolaño
When I was done traveling I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.

Roberto Bolaño
You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

Roberto Bolaño
Bright colors in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

Roberto Bolaño
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except the struggle to survive.

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

Roberto Bolaño
About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive.

Roberto Bolaño
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.

Roberto Bolaño
That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight.

Roberto Bolaño
One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either.

Roberto Bolaño
It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died.

Roberto Bolaño
Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It's like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said Yes, sir, over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing.

Roberto Bolaño
Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness.

Roberto Bolaño