"Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, 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 a path 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

"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 Bolaño

"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 Bolaño

"There's no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California."
— Roberto Bolaño

"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."
— Roberto Bolaño

"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 (oh yes), like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"The pain, or the memory of pain, that here was literally sucked away by something nameless until only a void was left. The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"This is my last communique from the planet of the monsters. Never again will I immerse myself in literature's bottomless cesspools. I will go back to writing my poems, such as they are, find a job to keep body and soul together, and make no attempt to be published."
— Roberto Bolaño

"Sobre el mercado editorial, bueno, yo creo que es una estafa: un montón de analfabetos funcionales comprando libros de algunos necios. Lo que hoy se entiende por literatura o por mercado editorial es una estafa disfrazada de intenciones políticamente correctas. No tiene nada que ver con la literatura."
— Roberto Bolaño

"For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy."
— Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

"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."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him...."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

""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.""
— Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

"reality is an AIDS-riddled whore"
— Roberto Bolaño

"He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"He 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 (2666)

"Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy."
— Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

""No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.""
— Roberto Bolaño

"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."
— Roberto Bolaño (Amulet)

"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 Bolaño

"He was an atheist and it had been years since he read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Philip K. Dick died
and now we only need
what is strictly necessary."
— Roberto Bolaño (The Romantic Dogs)

"Ivanov'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 (2666)

"Poetry and prison have always been neighbors."
— Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

"
Around this time, Pelletier and Espinoza, worried about the current state of their mutual lover, had two long conversations on the phone. The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later they would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word 'fate' used ten times and the word 'friendship' twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word 'Paris' was said seven times, 'Madrid', eight. The word 'love' was spoken twice, once by each man. The word 'horror' was spoken six times and the word 'happiness' once (by Espinoza). The word 'solution' was said twelve times. The word 'solipsism' once (Pelletier). The word 'euphemism' ten times. The word 'category', in the singular and plural, nine times. The word 'structuralism' once (Pelletier). The term 'American literature' three times. The word 'dinner' or 'eating' or 'breakfast' or 'sandwich' nineteen times. The word 'eyes' or 'hands' or 'hair' fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly. Pelletier told Espinoza a joke in German and Espinoza laughed. In fact, they both laughed, wrapped up in the waves of whatever it was that linked their voices and ears across the dark fields and the windows and the snow of the Pyrenees and the rivers and lonely roads and the separate and interminable suburbs surrounding Paris and Madrid."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me)."
— Roberto Bolaño

"And then Lihn got out of the swimming pool and we went down to the ground floor, and we made our way through the crowded bar, and Lihn said, The tigers are finished, and, It was sweet while it lasted, and, You’re not going to believe this, Bolaño, but in this neighborhood only the dead go out for a walk. And by then we had reached the front of the bar and were standing at a window, looking out at the streets and the façades of the buildings in that peculiar neighborhood where the only people walking around were dead. And we looked and looked, and the façades were clearly the façades of another time, like the sidewalks covered with parked cars that also belonged to another time, a time that was silent yet mobile (Lihn was watching it move), a terrible time that endured for no reason other than sheer inertia."
— Roberto Bolaño

"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?"
— Roberto Bolaño

"68. By then all poets will live in artistic communities calls jails or asylums. 69. Our imaginary home, the home we share. "
— Roberto Bolaño

"Le tendí la mano (no sé por qué, no soy dado a estos formalismos, al menos no en un bar y de noche) y él vaciló antes de darme la suya. Cuando se la estreché mi sorpresa fue mayúscula. Su diestra, que esperaba suave y vacilante como la de cualquier adolescente, exhibía al tacto una acumulación de callosidades que le daba una apariencia de hierro, una mano no demasiado grande, de hecho, ahora que lo pienso, ahora que vuelvo a aquella noche een los suburbios de Irapuato, lo que aparece ante mis ojos es una mano pequeña, una mano pequeña rodeada u orlada por los exiguos resplandores del bar, una mano que surge de un lugar desconocido, como el tentáculo de una tormenta, pero dura, durísima, una mano forjada en el taller de un herrerro."
— Roberto Bolaño

"54. The children of the Spanish lion, said Ruben Dario, a born optimist. The children of Walt Whitman, Jose Marti, and Violeta Parra; torn apart, forgotten, in mass graves, at the bottom of the sea, the Trojan destiny of their mingled bones terrifying the survivors. "
— Roberto Bolaño (Last Evenings on Earth)

"Durante un rato contemplé la máquina de escribir, el libro en donde estaban anotadas las visitas, un recipiente de madera lleno de lápices, clips y gomas de borrar que parecían estar en perfecto orden, lo que me pareció imposible pues nadie en su sano juicio ordena clips (lápices y gomas, sí, pero no clips) [...]"
— Roberto Bolaño

"What a sad paradox, though Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze the path 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 (2666)

""For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses.""
— Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives)

"The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The world euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. The the conversation proceeded more smoothly."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"On the front flap, the reader was informed that the Testamento geometrico was really three books, 'each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole,' and then it said 'this work representing the final distillation of Dieste's reflections and research on Space, the notion of which is involved in any methodical discussion of the fundamentals of Geometry.'"
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"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 (2666)

"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."
— Roberto Bolaño (The Skating Rink)

"He 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 (2666)

"From the sidewalk, after they paid the driver, they looked up at the lighted windows. Then, as the cab drove off, they saw Liz's silhouette, the beloved silhouette, and then, as if a breath of foul air had wafted into a commercial for sanitary pads, the silhouette of a man that made them freeze, Espinoza with a bouquet of flowers in his hand, Pelletier with a Jacob Epstein book wrapped in the finest paper. But the pantomime above didn't end there. In one window, [Liz] Norton's silhouette gestured, as if trying to explain something that her interlocutor refused to understand. In the other window, the man's silhouette, to the horror of its two gaping spectators, made a kind of hula-hooping motion, or what looked to Pelletier and Espinoza like a hula-hooping motion, first the hips, then the legs, the torso, even the neck! a motion that contained a hint of sarcasm and mockery, unless behind the curtains the man was undressing or melting, which seemed very unlikely; the motion, or the series of motions, expressed not only sarcasm but cruelty and assurance too, the assurance plain, since he was the strongest one in the apartment, the tallest, the most muscular, the hula-hooper."
— Roberto Bolaño

"[He] turned his back on the window, not knowing why he had gone to it, not knowing what he hoped to see, and just at that moment, when there was no one at the window any more and only a little lamp of colored glass at the back of the room flickering, it appeared."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"...posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats..."
— Roberto Bolaño

"He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Only in chaos are we conceivable."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"While 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 (2666)

"The card for the Santa Teresa cybercafe was a deepred, so red that it was hard to read what was printed on it. On the back, in a lighter red, was a map that showed exactly where the cafe was located. He asked the receptionist to translate the name of the place. The clerk laughed and said it was called Fire, Walk With Me."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war."
— Roberto Bolaño

"He dreamed that he and Elvira Campos lived together in a cabin in the mountains. The cabin didn't have electricity or running water or anything to remind them of civilization. The slept on bearskin, with a wolf skin over them. And sometimes Elvira Campos laughed, a ringing laugh, as she went running into the woods and he lost sight of her."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)