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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 Bolano

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That's A Pretty Story,'

Roberto Bolano

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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.

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…i Realized My Happiness Was Artificial. I Felt Happy Because I Saw The Others Were Happy And Because I Knew I Should Feel Happy, But I Wasn't Really Happy.

I'd Obviously Never Heard Of The Group, But My Ignorance In Literary Matters Is To Blame For That (every Book In The World Is Out There Waiting To Be Read By Me).

The Pain, Or The Memory Of Pain, That Here Was Literally Sucked Away By Something Nameless Until Only A Void Was Left. The Knowledge That This Question Was Possible: Pain That Turns Finally Into Emptiness. The Knowledge That The Same Equation Applied To Everything, More Or Less.

In Some Lost Fold Of The Past, We Wanted To Be Lions And We're No More Than Castrated Cats

Being Alone Makes Us Stronger. That’s The Honest Truth. But It’s Cold Comfort, Since Even If I Wanted Company No One Will Come Near Me Anymore.

Metaphors Are Our Way Of Losing Ourselves In Semblances Or Treading Water In A Sea Of Seeming.

The Truth Is We Never Stop Being Children, Terrible Children Covered In Sores And Knotty Veins And Tumors And Age Spots, But Ultimately Children, In Other Words We Never Stop Clinging To Life Because We Are Life.

Drink Up, Boys, Drink Up And Don’t Worry, If We Finish This Bottle We’ll Go Down And Buy Another One. Of Course, It Won’t Be The Same As The One We’ve Got Now, But It’ll Still Be Better Than Nothing. Ah, What A Shame They Don’t Make Los Suicidas Mezcal Anymore, What A Shame That Time Pases, Don’t You Think? What A Shame That We Die, And Get Old, And Everything Good Goes Galloping Away From Us.

I Kept Having Dreams All Night. I Thought They Were Touching Me With Their Fingers. But Dreams Don't Have Fingers, They Have Fists, So It Must Have Been Scorpions.

The Secret Story Is The One We'll Never Know, Although We're Living It From Day To Day, Thinking We're Alive, Thinking We've Got It All Under Control And The Stuff We Overlook Doesn't Matter.

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Dreams Fade With Morning Light, Never A Morn For Thee, Dreamer Of Dreams, Goodnight.

Nothing Happened Today. And If Anything Did, I’d Rather Not Talk About It, Because I Didn’t Understand It.

Reading Is More Important Than Writing.

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.

It's Strange How Things Happen, Mauricio Silva, Known As The Eye, Always Tried To Escape From Violence Even At The Risk Of Being Considered A Coward, But The Violence, The Real Violence, Can't Be Escaped, At Least Not By Us, Born In Latin America In The 1950s, Those Of Us Who Were Around Twenty Years Old When Salvador Allende Died.

Poetry And Prison Have Always Been Neighbors.

Literature Is The Product Of A Strange Rain Of Blood, Sweat, Semen, And Tears.

The Moon Is Fat And The Night Air Is So Pure It Seems Edible.

What Twisted People We Are. How Simple We Seem, Or At Least Pretend To Be In Front Of Others, And How Twisted We Are Deep Down. How Paltry We Are And How Spectacularly We Contort Ourselves Before Our Own Eyes, And The Eyes Of Others...and All For What? To Hide What? To Make People Believe What?

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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.

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Of What Is Lost, Irretrievably Lost, All I Wish To Recover Is The Daily Availability Of My Writing, Lines Capable Of Grasping Me By The Hair And Lifting Me Up When I'm At The End Of My Strength. (significant, Said The Foreigner.) Odes To The Human And The Divine. Let My Writing Be Like The Verses Of By Leopardi That Daniel Biga Recited On A Nordic Bridge To Gird Himself With Courage.

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Nothing Is Ever Behind Us.

There Is A Time For Reciting Poems And A Time For Fists.

Reading Is Pleasure And Happiness To Be Alive Or Sadness To Be Alive And Above All It's Knowledge And Questions.

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In The Current Socio-political Climate, He Said To Himself, Committing Suicide Is Absurd And Redundant. Better To Become An Undercover Poet.

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I'll Tell You, My Friends: It's All In The Nerves. The Nerves That Tense And Relax As You Approach The Edges Of Companionship And Love. The Razor-sharp Edges Of Companionship And Love.

The World Is Alive And No Living Thing Has Any Remedy. That Is Our Fortune.

So Everything Lets Us Down, Including Curiosity And Honesty And What We Love Best. Yes, Said The Voice, But Cheer Up, It's Fun In The End.

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Only In Chaos Are We Conceivable.

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