Antwerp Quotes

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

“Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour?”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“I suppose all the movies I've seen will be worth nothing to me when I die. Wrong. They'll be worth something, believe me. Don't stop going to the movies.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

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

“I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“There's a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses, it's miserable and it comes on at night.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“I no longer ask for all the loneliness of love or the tranquility of love or for the mirrors.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Maybe "warehouses" equals "mothers", a wide margin of error is permissible when you're dealing with super-impositions.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Silence glimmers in the empty hallways, on the radios no one listens to anymore.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Silence is love just as your raspy voice is a bird.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“One day I'll die of cancer.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Gray mattresses with red and blue stripes in something that looks like a hallway or an overly long waiting room. In any case, his memory is frozen in immediate past like a faceless man in a dentist's chair. There are houses and streets that run down to the sea, dirty windows and shadows on staircase landings. We hear someone say "a long time ago it was noon," the light bounces off the center of immediate past, something that's neither a screen nor attempts to offer images. Memory slowly dictates soundless sentences. We imagine that all of this has been done to avoid confusion, a layer of white paint covers the film on the floor. Fleeing together long ago became living together and thus the integrity of the gesture was lost; the shine of immediate past.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“The brief sound is like a color swallowed by a crack. But what color?”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Who was the first human being to look out a window?”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“She says to the fog: it's all right, I'm staying with you”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Tell that stupid Arnold Bennet that all his rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack. Anyway, they must be saying things like how was your day, I'm tired, there's an avocado sandwich in the kitchen, thanks, thanks, a beer in the refrigerator.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Sometimes I get the sense that it's all "internal"... Maybe that's why I lived alone and did nothing for three years ... (The man hardly ever washed, he didn't need a typewriter, all he had to do was sit in that shabby armchair for things to flee of their own accord)”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Nothing lasts, the purely loving gestures of
children tumble into the void.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“... among them the nameless girl, with her guillotine mouth, strolling through the past and the future like a movie face.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Above the street, like a hanged man, swings the spot-lit sign of the neighborhood's best restaurant, closed a long time ago.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“All I can come up with are stray sentences, he said, maybe because reality seems to me like a swarm of stray sentences.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“She was just a sad girl, I think, lost now among the multitudes.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Escribí este libro para mí mismo, y ni de eso estoy muy seguro. Durante mucho tiempo sólo fueron páginas sueltas que releía y tal vez corregía convencido de que no tenía tiempo. ¿Pero tiempo para qué? Era incapaz de explicarlo con precisión. Escribí este libro para los fantasmas, que son los únicos que tienen tiempo porque están fuera del tiempo.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Antwerp

“«Cualquiera es capaz de morir»”
― Roberto Bolaño, Amberes

“Enumerar es alabar,”
― Roberto Bolaño, Amberes