Quotes by Chilean Authors

Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? said Don Pancracio. I knew, but I pretended I didn't. What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense.
Roberto Bolaño
Eiffel Tower" To Robert DelaunayEiffel Tower Guitar of the skyYour wireless telegraphy Attracts words As a rosebush the beesDuring the night The Seine no longer flowsTelescope or bugleEIFFEL TOWERAnd it's a hive of words Or an inkwell of honeyAt the bottom of dawn A spider with barbed-wire legs Was making its web of cloudsMy little boy To climb the Eiffel Tower You climb on a songDo re mi fa sol la ti do We are up on top A bird sings in the telegraph antennae It's the wind Of Europe The electric windOver there The hats fly away They have wings but they don't singJacqueline Daughter of France What do you see up thereThe Seine is asleep Under the shadow of its bridgesI see the Earth turning And I blow my bugleToward all the seasOn the path Of your perfume All the bees and the words go their wayOn the four horizons Who has not heard this song I AM THE QUEEN OF THE DAWN OF THE POLES I AM THE COMPASS THE ROSE OF THE WINDS THAT FADESEVERY FALLAND ALL FULL OF SNOW I DIE FROM THE DEATH OF THAT ROSE IN MY HEAD A BIRD SINGS ALL YEAR LONGThat's the way the Tower spoke to me one dayEiffel Tower Aviary of the world Sing SingChimes of ParisThe giant hanging in the midst of the void Is the poster of FranceThe day of Victory You will tell it to the stars
Vicente Huidobro
While I'm writing, I'm far away;and when I come back, I've gone.
Pablo Neruda
The first conversation began awkwardly, although Espinoza had been expecting Pelletier's call, as if both men found it difficult to say what sooner or later the would have to say. The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word fate used ten times and the word friendship twenty-four times. Liz Norton's name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word Paris was said seven times, Madrid, eight. The word love was spoken twice, once by each man. The word horror was spoken six times and the word happiness once (by Espinoza). The word solution was said twelve times. The word solipsism seven times. The world euphemism ten times. The word category, in the singular and the plural, nine times. The word structuralism once (Pelletier). The term American literature three times. The words dinner or eating or breakfast or sandwich nineteen times. The words eyes or hands or hair fourteen times. The the conversation proceeded more smoothly.
Roberto Bolaño
You will fall with me as a stone in the grave
Pablo Neruda
The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
If you are great, El Topo is a great picture. If you are limited, El Topo is limited.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
No one knew what she was doing in Colonia Hidalgo, although it was most likely, according to the police, that she'd been taking a walk and had come upon death purely by chance.
Roberto Bolaño
So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,so close that your eyes close with my sleep.
Pablo Neruda
I feel like today should be a perfect Meatball day... Let's just get wastey-pants!
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
The two moments are much alike: birth and death are made of the same fabric.
Isabel Allende
There is no death, daughter. People die only when we forget them,' my mother explained shortly before she left me. 'If you can remember me, I will be with you always.
Isabel Allende
You came to my lifewith what you were bringing,madeof light and bread and shadow I expected you,and Like this I need you,Like this I love you,and to those who want to hear tomorrowthat which I will not tell them, let them read it here,and let them back off today because it is earlyfor these arguments.
Pablo Neruda
He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.
Isabel Allende
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.
Roberto Bolaño
I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen.
Pablo Neruda
But I don't want more things than I need, either.
Isabel Allende
He hoped that none of his descendants would get mixed up in politics, which was a trade for butchers and bandits.
Isabel Allende
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
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 Reiter'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 Reiter 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 Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed.
Roberto Bolaño
Morning"SUNThat awakens ParisThe highest poplar on the bank On The Eiffel TowerA tricolored cockSings to the flapping of his wingsand several feathers fallAs it resumes its course The Seine looks between the bridgesFor her old routeAnd the Obelisk That has forgotten the Egyptian words Has not blossomed this yearSUN
Vicente Huidobro
Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying, everything is absorbed through weather and the sea, and the moon swam back, its rays all silvered, and time and again the darkness would be broken by the crash of a wave, and every day on the balcony of the sea, wings open, fire is born, and everything is blue again like morning.
Pablo Neruda
I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you
Pablo Neruda
New Song"For You, ManuelitaInside the HorizonSOMEONE WAS SINGING The voice Is not known WHERE DOES IT COME FROM Among the branches No one is to be seen The moon itself was an ear And one hears no sound However a star unnailed Has fallen into the pond THE HORIZON HAS CLOSED UP And there is no exit
Vicente Huidobro
Child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived within him and who he will miss terribly
Pablo Neruda
Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.
Gabriela Mistral
Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.
Pablo Neruda
Laughing like crazythe child goes back to the citygives birth to monsterscreates earthquakeshairy women run nakedold folks who look like fetuses laugh and smoke.
Nicanor Parra
Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue.
Isabel Allende
All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.
Isabel Allende
Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.
Pablo Neruda
Tears are for happiness.
Marjorie Agosín
If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear.
Roberto Bolaño
Do not become attached to anything that can destroy you in the course of time.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.
Roberto Bolaño
I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will, people watching television, people going to football matches, boredom navigating the Chilean imagination like an enormous aircraft carrier. And that’s the truth. We were bored. We intellectuals. Because you can't read all day and all night. You can't write all day and all night. Splendid isolation has never been our style...
Roberto Bolaño
For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short.
Roberto Bolaño
She was not willing to let others narrate her life and her death. While there is one person like her in this world, I will find myself defending both her right to struggle and our obligation to remember.
Ariel Dorfman
I learned about lifefrom life itself,love I learned in a single kissand could teach no one anythingexcept that I have livedwith something in common among men.
Pablo Neruda
She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.
Isabel Allende
I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you,From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.
Pablo Neruda
Your eyes have the colour of the moon,
Pablo Neruda
Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that’s what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.
Roberto Bolaño
I guess after a certain age, things change and those things or people or friendships that happen in movies, just don't happen in real life.
Alberto Fuguet
... the novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
Roberto Bolaño
TO MAKE A LONG STORY SHORTTo make a long story shortI leave all my possessionsto the Municipal Slaughterhouseto the Special Unit of the Police Departmentto Lucky Dog LottoSo now if you want you can shoot
Nicanor Parra
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Wishes and fears are illusions, Dil Bahadur, not realities. You must practice detachment.
Isabel Allende
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables.
Pablo Neruda
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
Roberto Bolaño
I must say that my father is innocent. I should say it. I have to say it. I’m obliged to say it. My father will kill me if I don’t say he is innocent. The children of murderers cannot kill the father.
Alejandro Zambra
WHAT DOES AN OLD MAN GAIN BY EXERCISINGwhat will he gain by talking on the phonewhat will he gain by going after fame, tell mewhat does he gain by looking in the mirrorNothingeach time he just sinks deeper in the mudIt’s already three or four in the morningwhy doesn’t he try to go to sleepbut no--he won’t stop doing exercisewon’t stop with his famous long-distance callswon’t stop with Bachtt with Beethoventttt with Tchaikovskywon’t stop with the long looks in the mirrorwon’t stop with the ridiculous obsession about continuing to breathepitiful--it would be better if he turned out the lightRidiculous old man his mother says to himyou and your father are exactly alikehe didn’t want to die eithermay God grant you the strength to drive a carmay God grant you the strength to talk on the phonemay God grant you the strength to breathe may God grant you the strength to bury your motherYou fell asleep, you ridiculous old man!but the poor wretch does not intend to sleepLet’s not confuse crying with sleeping
Nicanor Parra
Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and well-roasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home!
Ariel Dorfman
I am a victim. To be an artist is to be a victim, because if you don't do what you want to do you die. That is the reality.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed.
Roberto Bolaño
Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.
Roberto Bolaño
The Indians’ insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of Satan there was no other explanation which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of love and forgiveness into them.
Isabel Allende
I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.
Roberto Bolaño
Sonnet LXXXI And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember. No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon. Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move after, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
Pablo Neruda