Quotes by Chilean Authors - Page 2

I’m not interested in external ego but internal satisfaction. I’m not interested just in easy glory but in constructing something….together we are trying to build a project that is not just short term
manuel pellegrini
In one kiss, you'll know all I haven't said.
Pablo Neruda
And so this letter endswith no sadness:my feet are firm upon the earth,my hand writes this letter on the road,and in the midst of life I shall bealwaysbeside the friend, facing the enemy,with your name on my mouthand a kiss that neverbroke away from yours.
Pablo Neruda
Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.
Roberto Bolaño
and everything burned in blue, everything a star
Pablo Neruda
He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul.
Isabel Allende
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
Roberto Bolaño
Everything is ceremony in the wild garden of childhood.
Pablo Neruda
Girl lithe and tawny, the sun that formsthe fruits, that plumps the grains, that curls seaweedsfilled your body with joy, and your luminous eyesand your mouth that has the smile of the water.A black yearning sun is braided into the strandsof your black mane, when you stretch your arms.You play with the sun as with a little brookand it leaves two dark pools in your eyes.
Pablo Neruda
When the bullseye becomes as big as an elephant in your mind, you won’t be able to miss it.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
She regretted nothing she had shared with her lover, nor was she ashamed of the fires that had changed her life; just the opposite, she felt that they had tempered her, made her strong, given her pride in making decisions and paying the consequences for them.
Isabel Allende
I've been so thoroughly incorporated into the California culture that I practice meditation and go to a therapist, even though I always set a trap: during my meditation I invent stories to keep from being bored, and in therapy I invent stories to keep from boring the psychologist.
Isabel Allende
Last night I walked for hours. It was as if I wanted to get lost down some unknown street. To get absolutely and happily lost. But there are moments when we can’t, when we don’t know how to lose our way. Even if we always go in the wrong direction. Even if we lose all our points of reference. Even if it begins to grow late and we feel the weight of morning as we advance. There are times when no matter how we try to find out what we don’t know, we can’t lose our way. And perhaps we long for the time when we could be lost. The time when all the streets were new.
Alejandro Zambra
It’s well known that he who returns never left
Pablo Neruda
I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles.
Isabel Allende
Desire is a powerful boat herding anchors and chains in the middle of the night.
Rosabetty Muñoz
Do tears not yet spilledwait in small lakes?Or are they invisible riversthat run toward sadness?
Pablo Neruda
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.
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
Nothing changes; we humans repeat the same sins over and over, eternally.
Isabel Allende
Don't cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won't let you see the stars.
Violeta Parra
Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?
Roberto Bolaño
I'm American. Why didn't I say I was African American? Because I'm in a foreign country? But can I really consider myself to be in a foreign country when I could go walking back to my own country right now if I wanted, and it wouldn't even take very long? Does this mean that in some places I'm American and in some places I'm African American and in other places, by logical extension, I'm nobody?
Roberto Bolaño
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Isabel Allende
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Pablo Neruda
Fear envelops bones like new skin,envelops blood with night’s skin,the earth moves beneath the soles of the feet -it is not your hair but the terror in your head,like long hair made of vertical nails,and what you see are not shattered streets,but rather, within you, your own crushed walls,your frustrated infinity, again the city comescrashing down: in your silence, only water’s threatis heard, and in the waterdrowned horses gallop through your death.
Pablo Neruda
I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.
Roberto Bolaño
Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don't let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.
Isabel Allende
Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.
Roberto Bolaño
I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.
Alejandro Amenábar
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. 
Pablo Neruda
To harden the earththe rocks took charge:instantlythey grew wings:the rocksthat soared:the survivorsflew upthe lightning bolt,screamed in the night,a watermark,a violet sword,a meteor.The succulentskyhad not only clouds,not only space smelling of oxygen,but an earthly stoneflashing here and therechanged into a dove,changed into a bell,into immensity, into a piercingwind:into a phosphorescent arrow,into salt of the sky.
Pablo Neruda
At night I dream that you and I are two plantsthat grew together, roots entwined,and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth,since we are made of earth and rain.
Pablo Neruda
Midnight"The hours glide Like drops of water on a window pane Midnight silence Fear unrolls in the air And the wind hides at the bottom of the well OH It's a leaf We think the earth is going to end Time stirs in the shadow Everyone is asleep A SIGH Inside the house someone has just died
Vicente Huidobro
Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad netstowards your oceanic eyes.There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,its arms turning like a drowning man's.I send out red signals across your absent eyesthat smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.You keep only darkness, my distant female,from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad netsto that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.The birds of night peck at the first starsthat flash like my soul when I love you.The night gallops on its shadowy mareshedding blue tassels over the land.
Pablo Neruda
I was born anew, owner of my own darkness.
Pablo Neruda
If it was true that all effort led to a vast abyss, she had two recommendations to begin with, first, not to cheat people, and, second, to treat them properly. Beyond that, there was room for discussion.
Roberto Bolaño
Por que en las epocas oscurasse escribe con tinta invisible?Why in the darkest agesdo they write with invisible ink?
Pablo Neruda
I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.
Isabel Allende
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
Pablo Neruda
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.
Roberto Bolaño
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.
Roberto Bolaño
You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
So that you will hear memy wordssometimes grow thinas the tracks of the gulls on the beaches.Necklace, drunken bellfor your hands smooth as grapes.And I watch my words from a long way off.They are more yours than mine.They climb on my old suffering like ivy.It climbs the same way on damp walls.You are to blame for this cruel sport.They are fleeing from my dark lair.You fill everything, you fill everything.Before you they peopled the solitude that you occupy,and they are more used to my sadness than you are.Now I want them to say what I want to say to youto make you hear as I want you to hear me.The wind of anguish still hauls on them as usual.Sometimes hurricanes of dreams still knock them over.You listen to other voices in my painful voice.Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications.Love me, companion. Don't forsake me. Follow me.Follow me, companion, on this wave of anguish.But my words become stained with your love.You occupy everything, you occupy everything.I am making them into an endless necklacefor your white hands, smooth as grapes.
Pablo Neruda
I don't know what I'm doing in Santa Teresa," Amalfitano said to himself after he'd been living in the city for a week."Don't you? Don't you really?" he asked himself."Really I don't," he said to himself. And that was as eloquent as he could be.
Roberto Bolaño
He said that knowledge was of little use without wisdom, and that there was no wisdom without spirituality, and that true spirituality always included service to others. As he explained many times, the essence of a good physician consisted of a capacity for compassion and a sense of the ethical, without which qualities the sacred art of healing degenerated into simple charlatanism.
Isabel Allende
We only have what we give.
Isabel Allende
I have the idea that we grandmothers are meant to play the part of protective witches; we must watch over younger women, children, community, and also, why not?, this mistreated planet, the victim of such unrelenting desecration. I would like to fly on a broomstick and dance in the moonlight with other pagan witches in the forest, invoking earth forces and howling demons; I want to become a wise old crone, to learn ancient spells and healers' secrets. It is no small thing, this design of mine. Witches, like saints, are solitary stars that shine with a light of their own; they depend on nothing and no one, which is why they have no fear and can plunge blindly into the abyss with the assurance that instead of crashing to earth, they will fly back out. They can change into birds and see the world from above, or worms to see it from within, they can inhabit other dimensions and travel to other galaxies, they are navigators on an infinite ocean of consciousness and cognition.
Isabel Allende
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. 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. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity.
Roberto Bolaño
I was going to be a memory when I grew up.
Alejandro Zambra
If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I loved you without knowing it, and I looked for your memory.In empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait
Pablo Neruda
I go, but I always remember you.
Isabel Allende
write with honesty and don't worry about the feelings of others, because no matter what you say, they'll hate you anyway.
Isabel Allende
Writing is a calling, not a choice.
Isabel Allende
​Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is badly out of balance, in favor of men.
Isabel Allende
But why give a man something it's so hard to earn? In that respect women are really thick. They're the daughters of rigidity. They need a man to feel secure but they don't realize that the one thing they should be afraid of is men. They don't know how to run their lives. They have to sacrifice themselves for the sake of someone else. Whores are the worst, patron, believe me. They throw their lives away working for some pimp, smile when he beats them, feel proud when he's well dressed, with his gold teeth and rings on his fingers, and when he goes off and takes up with a woman half their age they forgive him everything because 'he's a man.
Isabel Allende
At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.
Isabel Allende
…she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had.
Isabel Allende
Die slowlyHe who becomes the slave of habit,who follows the same routes every day,who never changes pace,who does not risk and change the color of his clothes,who does not speak and does not experience,dies slowly.He or she who shuns passion,who prefers black on white,dotting ones "it’s" rather than a bundle of emotions, the kind that make your eyes glimmer,that turn a yawn into a smile,that make the heart pound in the face of mistakes and feelings,dies slowly.He or she who does not turn things topsy-turvy,who is unhappy at work,who does not risk certainty for uncertainty,to thus follow a dream,those who do not forego sound advice at least once in their lives,die slowly.He who does not travel, who does not read,who does not listen to music,who does not find grace in himself,she who does not find grace in herself,dies slowly.He who slowly destroys his own self-esteem,who does not allow himself to be helped,who spends days on end complaining about his own bad luck, about the rain that never stops,dies slowly.He or she who abandon a project before starting it, who fail to ask questions on subjects he doesn't know, he or she who don't reply when they are asked something they do know,die slowly.Let's try and avoid death in small doses,reminding oneself that being alive requires an effort far greater than the simple fact of breathing.Only a burning patience will leadto the attainment of a splendid happiness.
Pablo Neruda