The Insufferable Gaucho Quotes

“If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“Los libros son finitos, los encuentros sexuales son finitos, pero el deseo de leer y de follar es infinito, sobrepasa nuestra propia muerte, nuestros miedos, nuestras esperanzas de paz.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“Permanence has been swept aside by the rapidity of empty images. The pantheon, we discover to our astonishment, is the doghouse of the burning asylum... We think our brain is a marble mausoleum, when in fact it's a house made of cardboard boxes, a shack stranded between an empty field and an endless dusk.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“At that moment, in spite of the dizziness, I felt like Nietzsche when he had his Eternal Return epiphany. An inexorable succession of nanoseconds, each one blessed by eternity.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“The night was dark as pitch or coal. Stupid expressions, thought Pereda. European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there's nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“Jim liked dark women, apparently, history's secret women, he would say, without elaborating. As for me, I liked blondes.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“....Les Misérablesis a book I read in Mexico many years ago and left behind in Mexico when I left Mexico for good, and I'm not planning to buy it or reread it, because there's no point reading, much less rereading books that have been made into movies...”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal—and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort—is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“Kafka understood that travel, sex, and books are paths that lead nowhere except to the loss of the self, and yet they must be followed and the self must be lost, in order to find it again, or to find something, whatever it may be - a book, an expression, a misplaced object - in order to find anything at all, a method, perhaps, and, with a bit of luck, the "new," which has been there all along.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“That was when I realized I was leaving my footprints all around the room. The soles of my feet were covered with blood. While continuing to move around, I carefully examined the prints. Suddenly I felt like laughing. They were dance steps. The footprints of St. Vitus. Footprints leading nowhere.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“God have mercy on my soul. Sometimes I wish they'd all just die. My friend and his mother and his father and my aunt and all the neighbors and passers-by and drivers who leave their cars parked by the river and even the poor innocent children who run around in the park beside the river. God have pity on my soul and make me better. Or unmake me.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“Argentina's like a novel, he said, a lie, or make-believe at best. Buenos Aires is full of crooks and loudmouths, a hellish place, with nothing to recommend it except the women, and some of the writers, but only a few. Ah, but the pampas—the pampas are eternal. A limitless cemetery, that's what they're like.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho

“En un oasis uno puede beber, comer, curarse las heridas, descansar, pero si el oasis es de horror, si sólo existen oasis de horror, el viajero podrá confirmar, esta vez de forma fehaciente, que la carne es triste, que llega un día en que todos los libros están leídos y que viajar es un espejismo. Hoy, todo parece indicar que sólo existen oasis de horror o que la deriva de todo oasis es hacia el horror.”
― Roberto Bolaño, El gaucho insufrible