Roberto Bolano
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.
We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
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.
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.
Every hundred feet the world changesCollection: Inspirational
You have to know how to look even if you don't know what you're looking for.Collection: Looks
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, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.Collection: Beach
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.Collection: Dream
The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.Collection: Alive
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.Collection: Flower
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?Collection: Believe
Only in chaos are we conceivable.Collection: Chaos
we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.Collection: Desperation
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.Collection: Alive
Nothing is ever behind us.Collection: Past
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.Collection: Games
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 end.Collection: Cheer
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.Collection: Struggle
Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.Collection: Today
Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Stronger
Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight.Collection: Dream
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.Collection: Book
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 of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.Collection: Law
The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.Collection: Moon
There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.Collection: Girl
Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something betterCollection: Love Is
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.Collection: Expectations
The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.Collection: Children
In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Summer
I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Book
If life is misery, why do we endure it?Collection: Misery
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.Collection: Telling The Truth
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.Collection: Dream
…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.Collection: Saws
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.Collection: Flower
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated catsCollection: Cat
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.Collection: Book
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.Collection: Sunset
No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.Collection: Secret
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.Collection: Done
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.Collection: Relax
Literature is the product of a strange rain of blood, sweat, semen, and tears.Collection: Rain
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.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Grief
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.Collection: Past
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.Collection: Struggle
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?Collection: Jobs