Fernando

“«No soy un nacionalista exacerbado, sin embargo siento un amor auténtico por mi país. Chile, Chile. ¿Cómo has podido cambiar tanto?, le decía a veces, asomado a mi ventana abierta, mirando el reverbero de Santiago en la lejanía. ¿Qué te han hecho? ¿Se han vuelto locos los chilenos? ¿Quién tiene la culpa? Y otras veces, mientras caminaba por los pasillos del colegio o por los pasillos del periódico, le decía: ¿Hasta cuándo piensas seguir así, Chile? ¿Es que te vas a convertir en otra cosa? ¿En un monstruo que ya nadie reconocerá?».”
― Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

“He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth the living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the question sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. It came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“Like all lovers, they spoke much of themselves, as if they might thereby understand the world which made them possible.”
― John Williams, Stoner