"Nothing is ever behind us."
- Roberto Bolaño
"Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of ..."
"You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement."
"A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy."
"I didn't hit her, man, what happened was that Maria was obsessed with the Marquis de Sade and wanted to try the spanking thing," said Luscious Skin. "That's very Maria," said Pancho. "She takes her re..."
"His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why."
"At the bar on the Favoritenstrasse, Julius the policeman talked to us about dignity, evolution, the great Darwin and the great Nietzsche. I translated so that my good friend Ulises could understand wh..."
"When you know something, you know it, and when you don't, you'd better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process."
"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,..."
"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 hims..."