Roberto Bolaño Quotes

“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

“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”

— Roberto Bolaño

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

— Roberto Bolaño

Every hundred feet the world changes

— Roberto Bolaño

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

— Roberto Bolaño

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

— Roberto Bolaño

“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

“Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.”

— Roberto Bolaño

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

— Roberto Bolaño

“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.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“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.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“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

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

— Roberto Bolaño

“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.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“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.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Drink up, boys, drink up and don't worry, if we finish this bottle we'll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won't be the same as the one we've got now, but it'll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don't make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

— Roberto Bolaño

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

— Roberto Bolaño

“Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

— Roberto Bolaño

“The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight.”

— Roberto Bolaño

Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.

— Roberto Bolaño

“And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“Posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats ...”

— Roberto Bolaño

“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

“For me, the word "writing" is the exact opposite of the word "waiting". Instead of waiting, there is writing.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“... dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed) ...”

— Roberto Bolaño

“Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“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

“His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.”

— Roberto Bolaño

No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she'd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.

— Roberto Bolaño

“Life is a succession of misunderstandings, leading us on to the final truth, the only truth.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“... 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 ...”

— Roberto Bolaño

“Everything's over, I thought. I felt rested, I'm home, I have lots to do. When I sat up in bed, though, all I did was start to cry like a fool, for no apparent reason.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“One day the Pope is having a quiet conversation with a German theologian in one of the rooms of the Vatican. Suddenly two French archaeologists burst in, very agitated and nervous, and they tell the Holy Father they have just got back from Israel with some very good news and some rather bad news. The Pope beseeches them to come out with it, and not to leave him in suspense. Talking over each other, the Frenchmen say the good news is they have discovered the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre? says the Pope. The Holy Sepulchre. Not a shadow of a doubt. The Pope is moved to tears. What's the bad news? he asks, drying his eyes. Well, inside the Holy Sepulchre we found the body of Christ. The Pope passes out. The Frenchmen rush to his side and fan his face. The only one who's calm is the German theologian, and he says: Ah, so Jesus really existed?”

— Roberto Bolaño

... then he sat on his bed and for a fraction of a second the shadows retreated and he had a fleeting glimpse of reality. He felt dizzy and he closed his eyes. Without knowing it he fell asleep.

— Roberto Bolaño

“The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it's the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast-flowing) river of fate. The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“In Charly Cruz's garage there was a mural painted on one of the cement walls. The mural was six feet tall and maybe ten feet long and showed the Virgin of Guadalupe in the middle of a lush landscape of rivers and forests and gold mines and silver mines and oil rigs and giant cornfields and wheat fields and vast meadows where cattle grazed. The Virgin had her arms spread wide, as if offering all of these riches in exchange for nothing. But despite being drunk, Fate noticed right away there was something wrong about her face. One of the Virgin's eyes was open and the other eye was closed.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“On the ride back to the hotel, they lost the sense of being in a hostile environment, although hostile wasn't the word, an environment whose language they refused to recognize, an environment that existed on some parallel plane where they couldn't make their presence felt, imprint themselves, unless they raised their voices, unless they argued, something they had no intention of doing.”

— Roberto Bolaño

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

— Roberto Bolaño

“My friend (if I may still call him that) believed in humanity, and so he also believed in order, in the order of painting and the order of words, since words are what we paint with. He believed in redemption. Deep down he may even have believed in progress. Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“Is that the true, the supreme terror, to discover that I am the wizened youth whose cries no one can hear?”

— Roberto Bolaño

“Those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“One day I'll die of cancer.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“The night was dark as pitch or coal. Stupid expressions, thought Pereda. European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there's nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.”

— Roberto Bolaño

God have mercy on my soul. Sometimes I wish they'd all just die. My friend and his mother and his father and my aunt and all the neighbors and passers-by and drivers who leave their cars parked by the river and even the poor innocent children who run around in the park beside the river. God have pity on my soul and make me better. Or unmake me.

— Roberto Bolaño

“Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“A bastard may have no imagination and then do one imaginative thing when you least expect it, said Espinoza.”

— Roberto Bolaño

“They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms.”

— Roberto Bolaño