Roberto Bolano Quotes - Page 2

I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

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

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

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

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.

Reading is more important than writing.

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.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

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

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.

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.

…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.

No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.

Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.

We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?

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

One should read Borges more.

I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow.