We praise men for rising above the low bar set for them, a cruel irony as they are also the ones deciding where the bar is, like a horrible game of limbo that for branding purposes let’s agree to call “white capitalist cisheteropatriarchy.”
“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
― The Savage Detectives
― The Savage Detectives
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
― The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
“So everything lets us down, including curiosity and honesty and what we love best. Yes, said the voice, but cheer up, it's fun in the end.”
― 2666
― 2666
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
― The Sheltering Sky
― The Sheltering Sky
“Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path 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.”
― 2666
― 2666
Roberto Bolaño
— 80 members
— last activity Aug 21, 2020 02:59PM
Grupo para hablar sobre el escritor y poeta chileno, autor de más de una veintena de libros, entre los cuales destacan sus novelas Los detectives salv ...more
Mia’s 2025 Year in Books
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