Roberto Bolano
Roberto Bolano
Roberto Bolaño Ávalos; 28 April 1953 – 15 July 2003) was a Chilean novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. In 1999, Bolaño won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for his novel Los detectives salvajes, and in 2008 he was posthumously awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel 2666, which was described by board member Marcela Valdes as a "work so rich and dazzling that it will surely draw readers and scholars for ages". The New York Times...
NationalityChilean
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth28 April 1953
CountryChile
…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn't really happy.
Death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear ... was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.
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.
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.
Only in chaos are we conceivable.
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…
As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavour except the struggle to survive.
When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we're nothing.
In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats
I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion.
You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims.
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.