Quotes by Chilean Authors

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
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
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
Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.
Pablo Neruda
Nations should be governed by a council of learned men who must answer to the people for their actions.
Isabel Allende
I can promise you that women working together – linked, informed and educated – can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.
Isabel Allende
you, my friend, could be the smoke’s daughter,you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage,lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth,your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest,your fingers there in the flames, your compact bodyrose from leaves of fire that make me recallthere were bakers in your family tree,you’re still the rainforest’s bread, ash from violent wheat,
Pablo Neruda
Escóndeme en tus brazospor esta noche sola,mientras la lluvia rompecontra el mar y la tierrasu boca innumerable.
Pablo Neruda
And I, infinitesima­l being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, I felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind.
Pablo Neruda
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour which the night fastens to all timetables.
Pablo Neruda
beyond the earth and the shadowthe brightness of our love will stay alive
Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest linesI loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Pablo Neruda
With which stars do they go on speaking,the rivers that never reach the sea?
Pablo Neruda
Sonnet LXXXI And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember. No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon. Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move after, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
Pablo Neruda
I repeated: come with me, as if I were dying,and no one saw in my mouth the moon that was bleeding,no one saw the blood that was rising into the silence.Oh love, now let us forget the star with thorns!
Pablo Neruda
Technologies that change society are technologies that change interactions between people
César A. Hidalgo
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.
Roberto Bolaño
I feel like today should be a perfect Meatball day... Let's just get wastey-pants!
Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi
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
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Isabel Allende
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
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
Joyful, joyful, joyful,as only dogs know how to be happywith only the autonomyof their shameless spirit.
Pablo Neruda
I want to see the thirstinside the syllablesI want to touch the firein the sound:I want to feel the darknessof the cry. I wantwords as roughas virgin rocks.” - Verb.
Pablo Neruda
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
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
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
I was going to be a memory when I grew up.
Alejandro Zambra
I have seen these persons speak unthinkingly, not realizing that to speak is also to be. Word and gesture are man's thought. We should not speak without reason.
Isabel Allende
The heart of the matter is whether knowing evil (or sin or crime or whatever you want to call it) is random or purposeful. If it's purposeful, we can fight it, it's hard to defeat, but we have a chance, like two boxers in the same weight class, more or less. If it's random, on the other hand, we're fucked, and we'll just have to hope that God, if He exists, has mercy on us. And that's what it all comes down to.
Roberto Bolaño
Green was the silence, wet was the light,the month of June trembled like a butterfly.
Pablo Neruda
Nothing is ever behind us.
Roberto Bolaño
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets. Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps. I hunger for your sleek laugh, your hands the color of a savage harvest, hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails, I want to eat your skin like a whole almond. I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body, the sovereign nose of your arrogant face, I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes, and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight, hunting for you, for your hot heart, Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
Pablo Neruda
His words saddened them greatly, though they couldn't say why.
Roberto Bolaño
my beauty, flower by flower, star by star,wave by wave, love, I have counted your body.
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
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
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 snow like dew to the pasture.
Pablo Neruda
I shivered in thosesolitudeswhen I heardthe voiceofthe saltin the desert.
Pablo Neruda
Of so much moon were your hips to me,of all the sun your deep mouth and its delight,of so much burning light like honey in the shade
Pablo Neruda
Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrowsloosens into the night the petals that form your formlet your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladderrung by rung taking off with me in my dream.I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows.Dark is the world’s night without you my love,
Pablo Neruda
Don't cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won't let you see the stars.
Violeta Parra
The mole is an animal that digs passages searching for the sun. Sometimes he reaches the surface. When he looks at the sun he goes blind.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
The Indians’ insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of Satan there was no other explanation which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of love and forgiveness into them.
Isabel Allende
Love brought its tail of pains,its long static beam of thorns,and we close our eyes so that nothing,so that no wound will separate us.
Pablo Neruda
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
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 know you exist not just because your eyes flyand give light to things like an open window
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
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
I learned about lifefrom life itself,love I learned in a single kissand could teach no one anythingexcept that I have livedwith something in common among men.
Pablo Neruda
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
By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness
Pablo Neruda
I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.
Isabel Allende
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
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my lifeAnd you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have rootsRememberThat on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my armsAnd my roots will set off to seek another land
Pablo Neruda
I do not love you except because I love you;I go from loving to not loving you,From waiting to not waiting for youMy heart moves from cold to fire.
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
My death..I mean..will it be quick,and with dignity? How will i know when the end is coming?""When you vomit blood,sir," Tao Chi'en said sadly.That happened three weeks later,in the middle of Pacific,in the privacy of the captain's cabin. As soon as he could stand , the old seaman cleaned up the traces of his vomit, rinsed out his mouth , changed his bloody shirt, lighted his pipe, and went to the bow of his ship , where he stood and looked for the last time at the stars winking in a sky of black velvet. Several sailors saw him and waited at a distance, caps in hands. When he had smoked the last of his tobacco, Captain John Sommers put his legs over the rail and noiselessly dropped into the sea.-Portrait in Sepia by Isabel Allende.
Isabel Allende