Happy birthday, Roberto Bolaño! Here are some quotes from his writing.
“Every hundred feet the world changes.”
“If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.”
“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
“[O]nly in chaos are we conceivable.”
“Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.”
“You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.”
“We interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”
“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.”
“The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”
“Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.”
“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”
“One should read Borges more.”
John Madera's fiction may be found in Conjunctions, Opium Magazine, The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing, and many other journals. His criticism may be found in American Book Review, Bookforum, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Rain Taxi: Review of Books, The Believer, The Brooklyn Rail, and many other venues. Recipient of an M.F.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, John Madera lives in New York City, where he runs Rhizomatic and manages and edits Big Other.