Mia Arts > Mia's Quotes

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“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, 2666

“Only in chaos are we conceivable.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“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 Bolano, 2666

“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

“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 Bolaño, 2666

“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“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 Bolaño, 2666

“In a word, and bluntly: as they walked around Sankt Pauli, it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn’t laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis’s house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they'd been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“When he went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror, he thought his features were changing. I look like a gentleman, he said to himself sometimes. I look younger. I look like someone else”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week.
"Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself.
"Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“For a while she thought about becoming a vegetarian. Instead, she took up smoking.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Drink up, boys, drink up and don’t worry, if we finish this bottle we’ll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won’t be the same as the one we’ve got now, but it’ll still be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don’t make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time pases, don’t you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Which is to say, boys, that I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Everybody tends to pigeonhole things they don’t understand,” said San Epifanio.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“He rode well. I'm a good horsewoman, but he was good as I was or maybe better, I don't know. At the time I thought he was better. Galloping without stirrups is hard and he galloped clinging to the horse's back until he was out of sight. As I waited I counted the cigarette butts that he had stubbed out beside the hut and they made me want to learn to smoke. Hours later, as we were on our way back in my father's car, him in front and me in back, he said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn't say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn't answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he'd said that about the pyramids. I kept thinking about pyramids. I kept thinking about my father's stony plot of land and much later, when I'd lost touch with him, each time I went back to that barren place I thought about the buried pyramids, about the one time I'd seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as mystery.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Everything that begins as comedy ends as a dirge in the void.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“1 de enero
Hoy me di cuenta de que lo que escribí ayer en realidad lo escribí hoy: todo lo del treintaiuno de diciembre lo escribí el uno de enero, es decir hoy. Lo que escribo hoy en realidad lo escribo mañana, que para mí será hoy y ayer, y también de alguna manera mañana: un día invisible. Pero sin exagerar.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“E incluso cabía una opción peor: que Cesárea hubiera torcido la realidad conscientemente.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Instead I waited, which is what the Nude Descending a Staircase does, contrary to one's expectation and which is exactly why it has always provoked such a peculiar critical response.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“There are fourteen million people living in Mexico City. I'll never see the visceral realists again. And I'll never go back to the university or to Álamo's workshop either. I don't know what I'm going to tell my aunt and uncle. I finished Aphrodite, the book by Louys, and now I'm reading the dead Mexican poets, my future colleagues.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“And I no longer ask for all the solitude in the world, but for time.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp