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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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Roberto Bolano
Age: 50 †
Born: 1953
Born: April 28
Died: 2003
Died: July 16
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Santiago
Chile
Ay
Passages
Tradition
Toward
Wasn
Clear
Death
Place
Passage
Reality
Eastern

More quotes by Roberto Bolano

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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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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.
Roberto Bolano
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…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 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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I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.
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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There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.
Roberto Bolano
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We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.
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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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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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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Literature + Illness = Illness
Roberto Bolano
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Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
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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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.
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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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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Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
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