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If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.

Roberto Bolano

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Roberto Bolano
Age: 50 †
Born: 1953
Born: April 28
Died: 2003
Died: July 16
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Santiago
Chile
Ay
Hear
Going
Expectations

More quotes by Roberto Bolano

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Reading is more important than writing.
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him.
Roberto Bolano
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The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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Literature + Illness = Illness
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto Bolano
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That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.' It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.
Roberto Bolano
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Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.
Roberto Bolano
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Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better
Roberto Bolano
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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.
Roberto Bolano
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Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
Roberto Bolano
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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 are pain.
Roberto Bolano