01c. 1978 AD…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.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
02c. 1978 ADNothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something betterRoberto Bolaño / quote ↗
03c. 1978 ADBooks 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.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
04c. 1978 ADEven on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
05c. 1978 ADI have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
06c. 1978 ADThe diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
08c. 1978 ADWhile he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
09c. 1978 ADEl silencio de la muerte es el peor de los silencios, porque el silencio rulfiano es un silencio aceptado y el rimbaudiano es un silencio buscado, pero el silencio de la muerte es el que corta de tajo lo que pudo ser y nunca más va a poder ser, lo que no sabremos jamás.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
12c. 1978 ADSólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
13c. 1978 ADHe chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, 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 paths 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.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
14c. 1978 ADIvanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
15c. 1978 ADWrite in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
16c. 1978 ADWhen 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.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
17c. 1978 ADAnother time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
18c. 1978 ADIvanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
19c. 1978 ADOne night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
20c. 1978 ADOf course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
21c. 1978 ADThe road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
22c. 1978 ADDid Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
23c. 1978 ADAs 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.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
24c. 1978 ADReading 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.Roberto Bolaño / quote ↗
