All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.

— Roberto Bolaño

And finally the two of them plunged into the dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Rater's body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Rater floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the body under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Rater vomit all the water he had swallowed.

— Roberto Bolaño

And I thought:History is like a horror story.

— Roberto Bolaño

[A]ND the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true, and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.

— Roberto Bolaño

An individual is no match for history.

— Roberto Bolaño

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines.

— Roberto Bolaño

Anyway, these ideas or feelings or ramblings had their satisfactions. 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. Furthermore, 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. Furthermore, they turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. Furthermore, they turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.

— Roberto Bolaño

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.

— Roberto Bolaño

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 endeavor except the struggle to survive.

— Roberto Bolaño

At the bar on the Favoritenstrasse, Julius the policeman talked to us about dignity, evolution, the great Darwin and the great Nietzsche. I translated so that my good friend Lies could understand what he was saying, although I didn’t understand any of it. The prayer of the bones, said Julius. The yearning for health. The virtue of danger. The tenacity of the forgotten. Bravo, said my good friend Lies. Bravo, said everyone else. The limits of memory. The wisdom of plants. The eye of parasites. The agility of the earth. The merit of the soldier. The cunning of the giant. The hole of the will. Magnificent, said my good friend Lies in German. Extraordinary.

— Roberto Bolaño