Roberto Bolano Quotes

You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.

Every hundred feet the world changes

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

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, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

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.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely, eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms, and little wildflowers.

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?

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

Nothing is ever behind us.

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.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it's so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.

Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.

So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.

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

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.

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.

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.

There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.