2666 Quotes

“He was a handsome and athletic young man with very fair skin, who clung to the Chilean professor like a limpet and every so often gestured theatrically and grimaced like a madman, and other times just listened to what Amalfitano was saying, constantly shaking his head, small movements of almost spasmodic denial, as if he were abiding only grudgingly by the universal rules of conversation or as if Amalfitano’s words (reprimands, to judge by his face) never hit their mark.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“He had the eyes of a blind man, I don’t mean he couldn’t see, but his eyes were just like the eyes of the blind, though I could be wrong about that.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Almendro who? Héctor Enrique Almendro?” said Amalfitano. “That’s the one. You know him?” asked Espinoza. “Not personally, but I wouldn’t bet much on a tip from Almendro,” said Amalfitano. “Why?” asked Norton. “Well, because he’s a typical Mexican intellectual, his main concern is getting by,” said Amalfitano. “Isn’t that the main concern of all Latin American intellectuals?” asked Pelletier. “I wouldn’t say that. Some of them are more interested in writing, for example,” said Amalfitano.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically. “Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.” “But exile,” said Pelletier, “is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.” “That’s just what I mean by abolishing fate,” said Amalfitano. “But again, I beg your pardon.” •”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically. “Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Schwob was traveling with his Chinese manservant, Ting, who got seasick at the drop of a hat. Or maybe he got seasick only if the sea was rough. In any case the trip was plagued by rough seas and seasickness.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Pelletier and Espinoza discovered that they were generous, so generous that if they’d been together they’d have felt the need to go out and celebrate, dazzled by the shine of their own virtue, a shine that might not last (since virtue, once recognized in a flash, has no shine and makes its home in a dark cave amid cave dwellers, some dangerous indeed),”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. But”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their incomprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote. But”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“he amused himself by thinking about a time with two speeds, one very slow, in which the movement of people and objects was almost imperceptible, and the other very fast, in which everything, even inert objects, glittered with speed. The first was called Paradise, the second Hell, and Archimboldi’s only wish was never to inhabit either.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“What a relief to give up literature, to give up writing and simply read!”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“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 (in uprisings that could be bloody, but didn’t therefore cease to be semblance), it set new rules.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“A woman who took care of everyone, except herself, and she begins to fade away in our arms. And even then we don’t realize,”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“what we think of as peacefulness is wrong and peacefulness or the realms of peacefulness are really no more than a gauge of movement, an accelerator or a brake, depending.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“All light is dead,' said Ingeborg. 'All this light was emitted thousands and millions of years ago. It's the past, do you see? When these stars cast their light, we didn't exist, life on Earth didn't exist, even Earth didn't exist. This light was cast a long time ago. It's the past, we're surrounded by the past, everything that no longer exists or exists only in memory or guesswork is there now, above us, shining on the mountains and the snow and we can't do anything to stop it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“You have to change. You have to turn yourself around and change. You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to, but that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of history, which in turn is permanently collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic. And what is magic? Magic is epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths 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 Bolaño, 2666

“Now all I read is poetry. Poetry is the one thing that isn’t contaminated, the one thing that isn’t part of the game. I don’t know if you follow me, Professor. Only poetry—and let me be clear, only some of it—is good for you, only poetry isn’t shit.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own. They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“A blind life in which everything had the transparency of water.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“she knew he was a prisoner and wanted to escape, she knew that love, no matter how mistreated or mutilated, always left room for hope, and that hope was her plan (or the other way around),”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“she knew he was a prisoner and wanted to escape, she knew that love, no matter how mistreated or mutilated, always left room for hope, and that hope was her plan (or the other way around), and that its materialization, its objectification,”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“she knew he was a prisoner and wanted to escape, she knew that love, no matter how mistreated or mutilated, always left room for hope, and that hope was her plan”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“It’s as if you were giving me a part of you,” said Vanessa.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The knowledge that this question was possible: pain that turns finally into emptiness. The knowledge that the same equation applied to everything, more or less.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“a woman who didn’t cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it’s therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are the minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666