Roberto Bolano Quotes
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For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.
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Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
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If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.
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You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.
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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.
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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?
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Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.
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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.
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Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
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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.
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In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats
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When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.
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Nothing is ever behind us.
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we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.
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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.
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In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.
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Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.
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Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
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The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
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Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
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The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.
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There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
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The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.
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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.
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The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.
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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.
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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.
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No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
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If life is misery, why do we endure it?
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One should read Borges more.
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