All Quotes

"Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful."

"If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone."

"Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It's like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing."

"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. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie."

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

"It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died."

"One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either."

"That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight."

"I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. ... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles..."

"La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres."

"About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive."

"Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness."

"He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules...it set new rules."

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel The Savage Detectives, two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella By Night in Chile, that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?"

"Who said literature has no real power to affect history? Not Bolaño — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter."

"I still don’t want to accept that W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, working only yesterday, are gone today. They each published for only a decade before dying in their fifties, but not before expanding our idea of what a novel can be. Half of what’s published these days bears their marks, and so it’s impossible for me to think of writers working today without thinking first of them."

"The moment we "discover" a favorite writer is like our experience of a cataclysmic event — we can remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when it occurred... So I assume I'll always recall the doctor's waiting room where I opened a dimpled, out-of-date issue of The New Yorker and found Roberto Bolaño's story "Gómez Palacio." For the first time, I was glad the doctor was running late, so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new."

"As a rule, It was the pleasure-haters who became unjust."

"And still all over Europe stood the horrible nurses Itching to boil their children. Only his verses Perhaps could stop them: He must go on working."

"Lay your sleeping head, my love Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral; But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie: Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful."

"Every farthing of the cost, All the dreaded cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost."

"About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."

"They never forgot That even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree."

"The expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

"I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street.I’ll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky."

"O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead."

"Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets."

"Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went."

"Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard."

"When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse."

"You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth."

"Earth, receive an honoured guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry."

"Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well."

"In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye."

"In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise."

"To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion."

"One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite."

"I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night."

"I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return."

"Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse."

"For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone."

"All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die."

"Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame."

"Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes — ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded."

"To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, Is a keen observer of life, The word 'Intellectual' suggests straight away A man who's untrue to his wife."

"At Dirty Dick's and Sloppy Joe's We drank our liquor straight, Some went upstairs with Margery, And some, alas, with Kate."

"My Dear One is mine as mirrors are lonely."

"At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the '30's, '40's, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year."

"No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted."