Roberto Bolano Quotes

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

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

There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.

Only poetry isn't shit.

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.

Reading is never a waste of time.

Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions. T.S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomas Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolano: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.

With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.

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

...posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats...

One is prepared for friendship, not for friends.

La gloria o el mérito de ciertos hombres consiste en escribir bien; el de otros consiste en no escribir.

So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely.

I get the idea perfectly, Mickey," said Archimboldi, thinking all the while that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

Academics always feel that they deserve more. (Roberto Bolano) Reading and enjoying fine literature is a highly cultivated and refined activity, whereas writing it is everything but so. (xxx)

For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.

What is a look of absolute fear?" Popescu asked. The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles untile he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear.

Dentro de mil años no quedará nada de cuanto se ha escrito en este siglo. Leerán frases sueltas, huellas de mujeres perdidas, fragmentos de niños inmóviles, tus ojos lentos y verdes simplemente no existirán. Será como la Antología Griega, aún más distante, como una playa en invierno para otro asombro y otra indiferencia.

So Lorenzo grew up in Chile without arms, an unfortunate situation for any child, but he also grew up in Pinochet’s Chile, which turned unfortunate situations into desperate ones, on top of which he soon discovered that he was homosexual, which made his already desperate situation inconceivable and indescribable. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?)

Dostum Borges aynalardan neden nefret ediyorsa ben de aynı nedenle ses kayıt cihazından nefret ediyorum, dedim. Siz Borges'in arkadaşı mıydınız, diye sordu Arturo Belano, bana biraz saldırgan gelen bir ses tonuyla, şaşırmış gibiydi. Artık uzaklarda kalan gençlik günlerimizde oldukça yakın arkadaştık, hem de çok yakın denebilir, diye cevap verdim. Kuzey Amerikalı kız Borges'in neden ses kayıt cihazından nefret ettiğini sordu. Herhalde kör olduğu için, dedim İngilizce olarak. Körlükle bu cihazın ne ilgisi var, diye sordu. Duymanın içerdiği tehlikeleri hatırlatıyor olmalı, kendi sesini, kendi ayak sesini, düşmanlarının ayak seslerini duymak, diye yanıtladım. Kuzey Amerikalı kız yüzüme bakarak onayladı. Borges'i pek iyi tanıdığını sanmıyorum. Benim eserlerimi bildiğiniyse hiç sanmıyorum, gerçi John Dos Passos İngilizceye çevirmişti. John Dos Passos'u da pek bildiğini sanmıyorum.

It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense, heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-on earth, which is a thin smell, and smell like Chorda filum." 2666, Bolano

I enjoy vegetarian food like I enjoy a kick in the stomach.

When Espinoza got back to the hotel he found Pelletier reading Archimboldi. Seen from the distance, Pelletier's face, and in fact not just his face but his whole body, radiated an enviable calm. When he got a little closer, he realised the book wasn't Saint Thomas but rather The Blind Woman, and he asked Pelletier whether he'd had the patience to reread the other book from start to finish. Pelletier looked up at him and didn't answer. He said instead that it was surprising, or that it would never cease to surprise him, the way Archimboldi depicted pain and shame. "Delicately," said Espinoza. "That's right," said Pelletier. "Delicately." p.143

Il Foro, secondo Vitruvio, aveva forma di parallelogramma, con una piazza nel mezzo, girata da un portico a colonne; secondo il Bolano era di pianta quadrata, a due piani; al

Inaki Echavarne, Giardinetto barı, Granada del Penedes sokağı, Barselona, Haziran 1994. Eleştiri, bir süre Yapıt'a eşlik eder, sonra yok olur ve bu kez yapıta Okurlar eşlik eder. Yolculuk uzun da olabilir kısa da. Sonra da Okurlar birer birer ölür ve Yapıt yoluna yalnız devam eder, derken başka Eleştiriler ve başka Okurlar çıkar yoluna. Sonra Eleştiri bir kez daha ölür, Okurlar bir kez daha ölür, Yapıt bu kemik yığını üzerinden geçerek yalnızlıklara yolculuğunu sürdürür. Yapıt'a yaklaşmak, gemiyi onun aydınlığında yüzdürmek kesin ölümün yanılmaz işaretidir, oysa başka Eleştiriler ve başka Okurlar durmaksızın yanaşırlar Yapıt'a, zaman hızla yutar onları da. Sonunda, Yapıt Sonsuzlukta yalnız sürdürür yolculuğunu. Ve bir gün, her şey gibi Yapıt da ölür, tıpkı Güneş'in söneceği, Yerkürenin, Güneş Sisteminin ve Yıldızların, insanoğlunun yok olacağı gibi. Komedi gibi başlayan her şey trajedi olarak son buluyor.

If you add infinity to infinity, you get infinity. If you mix the sublime and the creepy, what you end up with is creepy. Right?

Coincidence or a trick of fate (Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point this was what he believed), something that must hold some meaning, some larger truth, a sign of the terrible state of grace in which Padilla found himself, an emergency exit overlooked until now, or a message intended specifically for Amalfitano, a message perhaps signaling that he should have faith, that things that seemed to have come to a halt were still in motion, things that seemed like ruined statues were mending themselves and recovering.

He said that some nights he heard the tom-tom beat of his passion, but he didn't know for sure whether it was really the beat of his passion or of his youth slipping through his fingers, maybe, he added, it's just the beat of poetry, the beat that comes to us all without exception at some mysterious hour, easily missed but absolutely free.

The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revo-lutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings. The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind who almost literally gnaws at himself, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him. The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bol-shevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and the crowning touch- a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the Novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.

A metafora az egyik módja, hogy elvesszünk a látszat világában, vagy hogy mozdulatlanul álljunk a látszat tengerében.

We all have some idiot ancestor. All of us, at some point in our lives, discover the trace, the flickering vestige of our dimmest ancestor, and upon gazing at the elusive visage we realize, with astonishment, incredulity, horror, that we’re staring at our own face winking and grinning at us from the bottom of a pit. This exercise tends to be depressing and wounding to our self-esteem, but it can also be extremely salutary. My idiot ancestor was called Bolano (Bolanus) and he appears in the first book of Horace’s Satires, IX, in which Bolano accosts the poet as he walks along the Via Sacra. Says Horace: “Suddenly a fellow whom I knew only by name dashed up and seized me by the hand. ‘My dear chap,’ he said ‘how are things?’ ‘Quite nicely at the moment thanks,’ I said. ‘Well, all the best!’ He remained in pursuit, so I nipped in quickly: ‘Was there something else?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should get to know me. I’m an intellectual.’ ‘Good for you!’ I said.” What follows is a tiresome stroll for Horace, since he can’t shake Bolano, who ceaselessly offers advice, praising his own work and even his talent for singing. When Horace asks if he has a mother or family to care for him, Bolano answers that he’s buried them all and he’s alone in the world. Lucky for them, thinks Horace. And he says: “That leaves me. So finish me off! A sinister doom is approaching which an old Sabine fortune-teller foresaw when I was a boy.” The walk, nevertheless, continues. Bolano then confesses that’s he’s out on bail and must appear in court, and he asks Horace to lend him a hand. Horace, of course, refuses. Then a third person appears and Horace tries in vain to slip away. It must be added, in Bolano’s defense, that this new character, Aristius Fuscus, a dandy of the era, is just as much an idiot as Bolano and actually is Horace’s friend. In the end, it’s Aristius Fuscus who accompanies Bolano to his appointment with the law. There’s no moral to this story. We all have an idiot ancestor. He’s a specter, but he’s also our brother, and he lives deep inside each of us under different names that express our degree of implication in the crime: fear, ridicule, indifference, blindness, cruelty.

Mentre i messicani mangiavano carne alla griglia e patatine fritte, Fate si mise a pensare al tatuaggio di García. Confrontò poi la solitudine di quel rancho con la solitudine della casa di sua madre. Pensò alle sue ceneri che erano ancora là. Pensò alla vicina morta. Pensò al quartiere di Barry Seaman. E tutto quello che la sua memoria andava illuminando mentre i messicani mangiavano gli parve desolato.