Quotes by Chilean Authors - Page 4

Come see the cherry trees of a water constellationand the round key of the rapid universe,come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,come before its petals are consumed.
Pablo Neruda
With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?
Pablo Neruda
An individual is no match for history.
Roberto Bolaño
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.
Isabel Allende
And I thought:History is like a horror story.
Roberto Bolaño
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.
Isabel Allende
And I thought:History is like a horror story.
Roberto Bolaño
I move in the university of the waves.
Pablo Neruda
I had a serious library at my disposal, because my Popo believed that culture entered by osmosis and it was better to start early, but my favorite books were fairy tales.
Isabel Allende
Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
Isabel Allende
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…
Roberto Bolaño
Reading is more important than writing.
Roberto Bolaño
We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?
Roberto Bolaño
my beauty, flower by flower, star by star,wave by wave, love, I have counted your body.
Pablo Neruda
My ugly one, I love you for your waist of gold,my beauty, I love you because of a wrinkle on your forehead,love, I love you because you are clear and dark.
Pablo Neruda
You, in bloom, heart, beloved,you are like the foliage of the sky over my eyesand I look at you lying on the earth
Pablo Neruda
You are the trembling of time, that passesbetween vertical light and darkened sky,
Pablo Neruda
That's a pretty story,' said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky's genitals. 'A pity I'm too old and have seen to much to believe it.'It has nothing to do with belief,' said Ansky, 'it has to do with understanding, and then changing.
Roberto Bolaño
Every hundred feet the world changes
Roberto Bolaño
Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy....
Isabel Allende
Over your breasts of motionless current,over your legs of firmness and water,over the permanence and the prideof your naked hairI want to be, my love, now that the tears arethrowninto the raucous baskets where they accumulate,I want to be, my love, alone with a syllableof mangled silver, alone with a tip of your breast of snow.
Pablo Neruda
Although really society should not change, it should mutate. And, little by little, it is mutating...... Society is like the body of a chicken: the chicken's foot is hard and insensitive while the eye is very alive. And there are beings who embody the cells of the eyes and others who embody the cells of the feet, of the wings, or of the anus.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
This is true freedom: to be capable of leaving ourselves, crossing the boundaries of our little world to open up the universe.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
United States: the country where liberty is a statue.
Nicanor Parra
By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness
Pablo Neruda
This was a matter of some small group of guerrillas in some distant caves, a primitive, fanatical, and desperate people who didn't have the resources to intimidate the United States.
Isabel Allende
As my Popo used to say, life is a tapestry we weave day by day with threads of different colors, some heavy and dark, others thin and bright, all the threads having their uses. The stupid things I did are already in the tapestry, indelible, but I’m not going to be weighed down by them till I die. What’s done is done; I have to look ahead.
Isabel Allende
During these past years, not being able to speak with you, I dedicated myself to reviewing, within myself, the sacred books I know by heart. I had the idea I should summarize them in a single volume. Then, in a single chapter, then in a single page, and finally in a single sentence. This sentence is the greatest thing I can teach you. It seems simple, but if you understand it, you will never have to study again." The Rabbi recited it. And life, from that moment on, changed for Alejandro. "If God is not here, He is nowhere; this instant itself is perfection.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!
Roberto Bolaño
I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried...Books are like ghosts
Roberto Bolaño
Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind...The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.
Roberto Bolaño
He had a little single-story house, three bedrooms, a full bathroom and a half bathroom, a combined kitchen-living room-dining room with windows that faced west, a small brick porch where there was a wooden bench worn by the wind that came down from the mountains and the sea, the wind from the north, the wind through the gaps, the wind that smelled like smoke and came from the south. He had books he'd kept for more than twenty-five years. Not many. All of them old. He had books he'd bought in the last ten years, books he didn't mind lending, books that could've been lost or stolen for all he cared. He had books that he sometimes received neatly packaged and with unfamiliar return addresses, books he didn't even open anymore. He had a yard perfect for growing grass and planting flowers, but he didn't know what flowers would do best there--flowers, as opposed to cacti or succulents. There would be time (so he thought) for gardening. He had a wooden gate that needed a coat of paint. He had a monthly salary.
Roberto Bolaño
As with men, it has always seemed to me that books have their own peculiar destinies. They go towards the people who are waiting for them and reach them at the right moment. They are made of living material and continue to cast light through the darkness long after the death of their authors.
Miguel Serrano
While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.
Roberto Bolaño
Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people's ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.
Roberto Bolaño
The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.
Isabel Allende
Love is the grounding of our existence as humans and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.
Humberto R. Maturana
so this crow comes and it starts quacking at us.
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
I never knew how much I missed pickles and pickle juice. It's like, an overwhelming feeling that I can't even explain.
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
Love is the grounding of our existence as humans and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.
Humberto R. Maturana
so this crow comes and it starts quacking at us.
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
I never knew how much I missed pickles and pickle juice. It's like, an overwhelming feeling that I can't even explain.
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
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 endeavour except the struggle to survive.
Roberto Bolaño
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
Isabel Allende
Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.
Roberto Bolaño
Catholics form a majority in Chile, although there are more and more Evangelicals and Pentacostals who irritate everyone because they have a direct understanding with God while everyone else must pass through the priestly bureaucracy.
Isabel Allende
I have a hundred-year-old aunt who aspires to sainthood, and whose only wish has been to go into the convent, but no congregation, not even the Little Sisters of Charity, could tolerate her for more than a few weeks, so the family has had to look after her. Believe me, there is nothing so insufferable as a saint, I wouldn't sic one on my worst enemy.
Isabel Allende
They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.
Isabel Allende
The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all.
Roberto Bolaño
For a true artist, difficulties become opportunities and clouds become solid present.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.
Isabel Allende
Of course, they were other things too. Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition. Also, fame was reductive. Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished. Fame's message was unadorned. Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.
Roberto Bolaño
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears.
Roberto Bolaño
Mediante la fotografía y la palabra escrita intento desesperadamente vencer la condición fugaz de mi existencia, atrapar los momentos antes de que se desvanezcan, despejar la confusión de mi pasado.
Isabel Allende
Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhecknikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.
Roberto Bolaño
الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة
Isabel Allende
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
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.
Roberto Bolaño
Literary characters, like my grandmother's apparitions, are fragile beings, easily frightened; they must be treated with care so they will feel comfortable in my pages
Isabel Allende
Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.
Roberto Bolaño