Quotes by Chilean Authors - Page 5

My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.
Isabel Allende
Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.
Roberto Bolaño
He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
Roberto Bolaño
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Isabel Allende
Write what should not be forgotten.
Isabel Allende
I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had diedOne word then, one smile is enoughAnd I'm happy; happy that it's not true
Pablo Neruda
And tell me everything, tell chain by chain, and link by link, and step by step; sharpen the knives you kept hidden away, thrust them into my breast, into my hands, like a torrent of sunbursts, an Amazon of buried jaguars, and leave me cry: hours, days and years, blind ages, stellar centuries.
Pablo Neruda
Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.
Roberto Bolaño
yo te amo para comenzar a amarte,para recomenzar el infinitoy para no dejar de amarte nunca:por eso no te amo todavía.
Pablo Neruda
Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
Pablo Neruda
Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.
Pablo Neruda
Only poetry isn't shit.
Roberto Bolaño
I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.
Pablo Neruda
Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?
Pablo Neruda
De pronto no puedo decirtelo que yo te debo decir,hombre,perdóname; sabrásque aunque no escuches mis palabrasno me eché a llorar ni a dormiry que contigo estoy sin vertedesde hace tiempo y hasta el fin.I can't just suddenly tell youwhat I should be telling you,friend, forgive me; you knowthat although you don't hear my words,I wasn't asleep or in tears,that I am with you without seeing youfor a good long time and until the end.
Pablo Neruda
A book,a book fullof human touches,of shirts,a bookwithout loneliness, with menand tools,a bookis victory.
Pablo Neruda
Soy el desesperado, la palabra sin ecos, el que lo perdiò todo, y el que todo lo tuvo.
Pablo Neruda
La heradera del dia destruida.(The heiress of the destroyed day.)
Pablo Neruda
Well, now,if little by little you stop loving meI shall stop loving you little by little.If suddenlyyou forget medo not look for me,for I shall already have forgotten you.
Pable Neruda
I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.
Pablo Neruda
Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.
Pablo Neruda
Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.
Pablo Neruda
So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Pablo Neruda
You shall create beauty not to excite the sensesbut to give sustenance to the soul.
Gabriela Mistral
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
Roberto Bolaño
Our love was bornoutside the walls,in the wind,in the night,in the earth,and that's why the clay and the flower,the mud and the rootsknow your name.
Pablo Neruda
I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.
Pablo Neruda
I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.
Pablo Neruda
Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos
Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.Write, for example,'The night is shatteredand the blue stars shiver in the distance.'The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.Tonight I can write the saddest lines.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.Through nights like this one I held her in my armsI kissed her again and again under the endless sky.She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.How could one not have loved her great still eyes.Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.What does it matter that my love could not keep her.The night is shattered and she is not with me.This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.My sight searches for her as though to go to her.My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.The same night whitening the same trees.We, of that time, are no longer the same.I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.Her voide. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.Because through nights like this one I held her in my armsmy sould is not satisfied that it has lost her.Though this be the last pain that she makes me sufferand these the last verses that I write for her.
Pablo Neruda
I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases.....
Pablo Neruda
You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Pablo Neruda
Love is a clash of lightnings
Pablo Neruda
Poetry is an act of peace. Peace goes into the making of a poet as flour goes into the making of bread.
Pablo Neruda
Each in the most hidden sack keptthe lost jewels of memory,intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,the fragment of public or private happiness.A few, the wolves, collected thighs,other men loved the dawn scratchingmountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.For me happiness was to share singing,praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:my life had no use on earth.
Pablo Neruda
I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,absorbing and thinking, eating each day.
Pablo Neruda
I want to see thirstIn the syllables,Tough fireIn the sound;Feel through the darkFor the scream.
Pablo Neruda
Green was the silence, wet was the light,the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda
The days aren't discarded or collected, they are beesthat burned with sweetness or maddenedthe sting: the struggle continues,the journeys go and come between honey and pain.No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,or action, or silence, or honor:life is like a stone, a single motion,a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metalthat climbs or descends burning in your bones.
Pablo Neruda
I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.
Pablo Neruda
It was at that agethat poetry came in search of me.
Pablo Neruda
We the mortals touch the metals,the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,knowing they will go on, inert or burning,and I was discovering, naming all the these things:it was my destiny to love and say goodbye.
Pablo Neruda
لقد عرف كيف يموت ، كما عرف كيف يعيش
Isabel Allende
El silencio de la muerte es el peor de los silencios, porque el silencio rulfiano es un silencio aceptado y el rimbaudiano es un silencio buscado, pero el silencio de la muerte es el que corta de tajo lo que pudo ser y nunca más va a poder ser, lo que no sabremos jamás.
Roberto Bolaño
While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.
Roberto Bolaño
Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span...
Isabel Allende
I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.
Roberto Bolaño
Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or the air in her lungs; her repose would be absolute- not to think, not to feel, not to be.
Isabel Allende
The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.
Roberto Bolaño
I don't eat friggin' lobster or anything like that. Because they're alive when you kill it.
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
Just as when we come into the world, when we die we are afraid of the unknown. But the fear is something from within us that has nothing to do with reality. Dying is like being born: just a change
Isabel Allende
No, my dog used to gaze at me,paying me the attention I need,the attention requiredto make a vain person like me understandthat, being a dog, he was wasting time,but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,he’d keep on gazing at mewith a look that reserved for me aloneall his sweet and shaggy life,always near me, never troubling me,and asking nothing.
Pablo Neruda
Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.
Pablo Neruda
I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.
Roberto Bolaño
Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano.
Pablo Neruda
Donde termina el arco iris,en tu alma o en el horizonte?Where does the rainbow end,in your soul or on the horizon?
Pablo Neruda
Y por que el sol es tan mal amigodel caminante en el desierto?Y por que el sol es tan simpaticoen el jardin del hospital?And why is the sun such a bad companionto the traveler in the desert?And why is the sun so congenial in the hospital garden?
Pablo Neruda
Even on the poorest streets people could be heard laughing. Some of these streets were completely dark, like black holes, and the laughter that came from who knows where was the only sign, the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.
Roberto Bolaño
Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.
Roberto Bolaño
You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
Pablo Neruda