Roberto Bolano Quotes

62 quotes in 970 categories

• We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
• 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…
• Literature + Illness = Illness
• 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…
• 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…
• Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him....
• 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…
• 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…
• No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.
• 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…
• 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,…
• There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
• 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…

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