Chilean novelist, poet & essayist (1953-2003)
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 BOLAÑO
2666
Isn't reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
In dreams, as in the Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Poetry is the one thing that isn't contaminated, the one thing that isn't part of the game.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Coincidence, if you'll permit the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
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.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
One never knows anything about one's father. A father ... is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
Nothing is ever behind us.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
The truth is like a strung-out pimp in the middle of a storm.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
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 BOLAÑO
By Night in Chile
Wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
People see what they want to see and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666
The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children.
ROBERTO BOLAÑO
2666