2666 Quotes

“Reading is never a waste of time.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“Life is shit, thought Pelletier in astonishment, all of it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“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

“...posterity was a vaudeville joke audible only to those with front-row seats...”
― Roberto Bolano

“I don’t have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don’t have much time, I have to breath, eat, drink, sleep. I don’t have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don’t have much time, I’m busy living. I don’t have much time, I’m busy dying.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The end of this history saw the banality of art merge with the banality of the real world - Duchamp's act, with its automatic transference of the object, being the inaugural (and ironic) gesture in this process. The transference of all reality into aesthetics, which has become one of the dimensions of generalized exchange...
All this under the banner of a simultaneous liberation of art and the real world.
This 'liberation' has in fact consisted in indexing the two to each other - a chiasmus lethal to both.
The transference of art, become a useless function, into a reality that is now integral, since it has absorbed everything that denied, exceeded or transfigured it. The impossible exchange of this Integral Reality for anything else whatever. Given this, it can only exchange itself for itself or, in other words, repeat itself ad infinitum.
What could miraculously reassure us today about the essence of art? Art is quite simply what is at issue in the world of art, in that desperately self-obsessed artistic community. The 'creative' act doubles up on itself and is now nothing more than a sign of its own operation - the painter's true subject is no longer what he paints but the very fact that he paints. He paints the fact that he paints. At least in that way the idea of art remains intact.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“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, 2666

“Beyond the end: the only unrestricted view.
Running after your shadow: the only way out from perpetual motion.
Dispersing the viewpoints: the only solution to the squaring of the circle.

His hypocritical air derived from the fact that he suffered simultaneously from an inferiority and a superiority complex towards himself.

The principle of insufficient reason: the only things that really take place are those which do not have sufficient reason to do so.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“And speaking of shit, she said, let's get something to eat.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense, heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-on earth, which is a thin smell, and smell like Chorda filum."
2666, Bolano”
― Bolaño, Roberto

“Los boxeadores chilenos son todos unos maricones, los habitantes de este país de mierda son todos unos maricones, todos sin excepción, dispuestos a dejarse engañar, dispuestos a dejarse comprar, dispuestos a bajarse los pantalones cuando uno sólo les ha pedido que se quiten el reloj.”
― Roberto Bolaño

“Çemberin içinde hata yaparsanız hatalarınızın bir önemi olmuyor. Hatalarınız hata olmaktan çıkıyor. Hata yapmak, çıkmaza düşmek politik erdemlerdendir, taktiktir, politik anlamda var olmanızı, basının dikkatini çekmenizi sağlar ve politikada haklı olup silinmektense hata yapıp her yerde olmak çok daha iyidir. Varlığınızı, ağırlığınızı koruduğunuz sürece dilediğiniz kadar çuvallayabilirsiniz.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666

“The Red Cedar of Vancouver. It is six hundred years old and can expect to live until the twenty-seventh century. There is something disturbing about finding yourself in front of a living thing which you know will be there in six centuries' time. As though it had already survived you. You feel dead in advance, and yet so far removed (a spatial depth, measurable in light-years) that all anxiety is dispelled. You even feel a little immortal through this tree that has survived so many of its descendants. There is no equivalent in the human species; no one lives to be proportionately as old as the four-thousand-year-old spruces of deepest Arizona.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“In a Chinese film, a man is responsible for the death of a child, his friend's son. He attempts, first of all, to make amends for the death with money. The father is prepared to accept it, but the mother rejects it. She wants vengeance: the man owes her a life in exchange. He then sees no solution but to die. But the mother denies him that too easy solution, the suicide that would unbind him forever. He must, then, renounce dying. Only on these terms is the mother reconciled to him.

Those politicians who try to slip a bit of power to the 'intellectuals' (missions, commissions, etc.) - on the one hand, to prove to themselves that they have some, but, above all, so as to leave no one outside the field of power. 'If I knew that there still are on this earth some men without any power I would say that nothing is lost' (Canetti).

As Nerval says of hours, so it is with books: it is already the next one, it is still the last one, and it is always the only one.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“For America, only one method: given a certain number of fragments, notes and stories collected over a given time, there must be a solution which integrates them all, including the most banal, into a necessary whole, without adding or removing any: the very necessity which, beneath the surface, presided over their collection. Making the supposition that this is the only material and the best, because it is secretly ordered by the same thinking, and assuming that everything conceived as part of the same obsession has a meaning and that there must necessarily be a solution to the problem of reconstituting it. The work starts out from the certainty that everything is already there and it will be sufficient simply to find the key .

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.

In the same way as we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of knowledge.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“Coincidence or a trick of fate (Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point this was what he believed), something that must hold some meaning, some larger truth, a sign of the terrible state of grace in which Padilla found himself, an emergency exit overlooked until now, or a message intended specifically for Amalfitano, a message perhaps signaling that he should have faith, that things that seemed to have come to a halt were still in motion, things that seemed like ruined statues were mending themselves and recovering.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman

“He said that some nights he heard the tom-tom beat of his passion, but he didn't know for sure whether it was really the beat of his passion or of his youth slipping through his fingers, maybe, he added, it's just the beat of poetry, the beat that comes to us all without exception at some mysterious hour, easily missed but absolutely free.”
― Roberto Bolaño, Woes of the True Policeman