Roberto Bolano Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

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

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.

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

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

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.

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.

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

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

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

One should read Borges more.

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.

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

Literature + Illness = Illness

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.

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

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

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.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.

Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.

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.

I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).

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.

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.

If life is misery, why do we endure it?

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

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

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

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.