Quotes from The Savage Detectives

“There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“I'm an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“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.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“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.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“For a while, Criticism travels side by side with the Work, then Criticism vanishes and it's the Readers who keep pace. The journey may be long or short. Then the Readers die one by one and the Work continues on alone, although a new Criticism and new Readers gradually fall into step with it along its path. Then Criticism dies again and the Readers die again and the Work passes over a trail of bones on its journey toward solitude. To come near the work, to sail in her wake, is a sign of certain death, but new Criticism and new Readers approach her tirelessly and relentlessly and are devoured by time and speed. Finally the Work journeys irremediably alone in the Great Vastness. And one day the Work dies, as all things must die and come to an end: the Sun and the Earth and the Solar System and the Galaxy and the farthest reaches of man's memory. Everything that begins as comedy ends in tragedy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“We're artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don't we?”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“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.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“In a brief moment of lucidity, I was sure that we'd all gone crazy. But then that moment of lucidity was displaced by a supersecond of superlucidity (if I can put it that way), in which I realized that this scene was the logical outcome of our ridiculous lives. It wasn't a punishment but a new wrinkle. It gave us a glimpse of ourselves in our common humanity. It wasn't proof of our idle guilt but a sign of our miraculous and pointless innocence. But that's not it. That's not it. We were still and they were in motion and the sand on the beach was moving, not because of the wind but because of what they were doing and what we were doing, which was nothing, which was watching, and all of that together was the wrinkle, the moment of superlucidity. Then, nothing.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Supe entonces, con humildad, con perplejidad, en un arranque de mexicanidad absoluta, que estábamos gobernados por el azar y que en esa tormenta todos nos ahogaríamos, y supe que sólo los más astutos, no yo ciertamente, iban a mantenerse a flote un poco más de tiempo.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Qué lástima que pase el tiempo ¿verdad?, qué lástima que nos muramos y que nos hagamos viejos y que las cosas buenas se vayan alejando de nosotros al galope.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“I’m seventeen years old, my name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Not only to myself or before the mirror or at the hour of my death, which I hope will be long in coming, but in the presence of my children and my wife and in the face of the peaceful life I’m building, I must acknowledge: (1) That under Stalin I wouldn’t have wasted my youth in the gulag or ended up with a bullet in the back of my head. (2) That in the McCarthy era I wouldn’t have lost my job or had to pump gas at a gas station. (3) That under Hitler, however, I would have been one of those who chose the path of exile, and that under Franco I wouldn’t have composed sonnets to the caudillo or the Holy Virgin like so many lifelong democrats. One thing is as true as the other. My bravery has its limits, certainly, but so does what I’m willing to swallow. Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragicomedy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Hay momentos para recitar poesías y hay momentos para boxear.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“Which is to say, boys, that I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“The demented strutting of a dumb bird in the moonlight.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“One of the inconveniences of stealing books—especially for a novice like myself—is that sometimes you have to take what you can get.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

“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 reading seriously.”
― Roberto Bolaño, quote from The Savage Detectives

About the author

Popular quotes

“He really would have done all that for her, you see, and done it believing he'd burn in hell forever for doing it. He hadn't done it, and wouldn't had made her his anyway, but you see why he'd have figured it did. Or maybe I saw it anyway, at the time. He was a maniac and a monster, but people don't love like that anymore. Or maybe it's only the maniacs and monsters who do. I don't know. ”
― Peter S. Beagle, quote from Tamsin

“I'm tired of this. It's like, just when I think our goal is within reach, it slips right through our fingers. It's happened time and again. Now, when we finally in our grasp, the truth slaps us in the face.”
― Hiromu Arakawa, quote from Fullmetal Alchemist, Vol. 3

“As Coach explained his version of the day’s events to Dad and Sylvia on the brick drive of our house, Will finally decided to acknowledge me.”
― Cidney Swanson, quote from Rippler

“Poet is Priest
Money has reckoned the soul of America
Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity
the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear Russia out of Kansas
The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife.
Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman
just as Maykovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia
Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America
just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House
while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain
and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress
no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America
and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas
aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness
and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity
eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers
and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed in the screaming of her comedians over the radio”
― Allen Ginsberg, quote from Kaddish and Other Poems

“Tell me you're not going to do anything stupid." "I'm not that kind of guy, Peter." "Not usually, no. But I've seen the look you've got in your eyes. A guy so consumed with his demons he'd throw himself on a min to escape it. Then they send the little polished medal home to the people who love him. You've got a lot of people who care about you, Ben. Don't do that to them. If you don't trust yourself tonight, then let me shadow you." Ben sighed, looked back out in the darkness. "Fine, but keep a distance. I don't want anyone to think we're dating." "No chance of that. I wouldn't be caught dead dating an ambulance chaser.”
― Joey W. Hill, quote from Hostile Takeover

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.