Quotes by Chilean Authors

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad netstowards your oceanic eyes.There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,its arms turning like a drowning man's.I send out red signals across your absent eyesthat smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.You keep only darkness, my distant female,from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad netsto that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.The birds of night peck at the first starsthat flash like my soul when I love you.The night gallops on its shadowy mareshedding blue tassels over the land.
Pablo Neruda
Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language!
Pablo Neruda
You are engaging in madness. I feel obliged to accompany you.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
I will die kissing your mad cold mouth,embracing the lost bouquet of your body,and searching for the light of your closed eyes
Pablo Neruda
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
Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.
Roberto Bolaño
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Pablo Neruda
Sufre mas el que espera siempreque aquel que nunca espero a nadie?Does he who is always waiting suffer more than he who’s never waited for anyone?
Pablo Neruda
His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!
Roberto Bolaño
... the novel, arguably the author's best, had a disquieting power, like a sleeping crocodile.
Roberto Bolaño
My worst flaw is that I tell secrets, my own and everybody else's.
Isabel Allende
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
Accept the children the way we accept trees—with gratitude, because they are a blessing—but do not have expectations or desires. You don’t expect trees to change, you love them as they are.
Isabel Allende
Take bread away from me, if you wish,take air away, butdo not take from me your laughter.Do not take away the rose,the lance flower that you pluck,the water that suddenlybursts forth in joy,the sudden waveof silver born in you.My struggle is harsh and I come backwith eyes tiredat times from having seenthe unchanging earth,but when your laughter entersit rises to the sky seeking meand it opens for me allthe doors of life.My love, in the darkesthour your laughteropens, and if suddenlyyou see my blood stainingthe stones of the street,laugh, because your laughterwill be for my handslike a fresh sword.Next to the sea in the autumn,your laughter must raiseits foamy cascade,and in the spring, love,I want your laughter likethe flower I was waiting for,the blue flower, the roseof my echoing country.Laugh at the night,at the day, at the moon,laugh at the twistedstreets of the island,laugh at this clumsyfool who loves you,but when I openmy eyes and close them,when my steps go,when my steps return,deny me bread, air,light, spring,but never your laughter.
Pablo Neruda
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously. ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory.
Isabel Allende
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
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
Until a few months ago we had a code of honor, and even the worst ruffians behaved with decency. You could leave your gold in a tent with no guard and no one would touch it, but now all that has changed. The law of the jungle rules, the only ideology is greed. Don't let yourself be parted from your weapons, and always travel in pairs or groups, because this is a land of thieves.
Isabel Allende
[A]nd the wizened youth trembles more and more violently, wrinkles his nose and then pounces on the story. But only I know the story, the real story. And it is simple and cruel and true and it should make us laugh, it should make us die laughing. But we only know how to cry, the only thing we do wholeheartedly is cry.
Roberto Bolaño
Come see the cherry trees of a water constellationand the round key of the rapid universe,come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,come before its petals are consumed.
Pablo Neruda
الكتابة مثل الشعوذة : لايكفي إخراج أرنب من القبعة ، بل يجب عمل ذلك بأناقة وطريقة ممتعة
Isabel Allende
Many things we need can wait. The child cannot. Now is the time his bones are formed, his mind developed. To him we cannot say tomorrow, his name is today.
Gabriela Mistral
I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.
Isabel Allende
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 learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Isabel Allende
All names disappear. Children should be taught that in elementary school. But we're afraid to teach them.
Roberto Bolaño
And so this letter endswith no sadness:my feet are firm upon the earth,my hand writes this letter on the road,and in the midst of life I shall bealwaysbeside the friend, facing the enemy,with your name on my mouthand a kiss that neverbroke away from yours.
Pablo Neruda
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.
Roberto Bolaño
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
For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time.
Isabel Allende
I love you like the plant that does not bloomand carries in itself, hidden, the light of those flowers,
Pablo Neruda
Love, my territory of kisses and volcanoes.
Pablo Neruda
When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.
Roberto Bolaño
I am no longer in love with her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Pablo Neruda
Por que en las epocas oscurasse escribe con tinta invisible?Why in the darkest agesdo they write with invisible ink?
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
By night, beloved, tie your heart to mineand let them both in dreams defeat the darkness
Pablo Neruda
You know how this is:if I lookat the crystal moon, at the red branchof the slow autumn at my window,if I touchnear the firethe impalpable ashor the wrinkled body of the log,everything carries me to you,as if everything that exists,aromas, light, metals,were little boatsthat sailtoward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Pablo Neruda
Reading is more important than writing.
Roberto Bolaño
All you will have is the present. Waste no energy crying over yesterday or dreaming of tomorrow. Nostalgia is fatiguing and destructive, it is the vice of the expatriate. You must put down roots as if they were forever, you must have a sense of permanence.
Isabel Allende
Each in the most hidden sack keptthe lost jewels of memory,intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,the fragment of public or private happiness.A few, the wolves, collected thighs,other men loved the dawn scratchingmountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.For me happiness was to share singing,praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:my life had no use on earth.
Pablo Neruda
I know you exist not just because your eyes flyand give light to things like an open window
Pablo Neruda
You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman's fears.
Roberto Bolaño
He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.
Isabel Allende
Writing is like making love. Don't worry about the orgasm, just concentrate on the process.
Isabel Allende
yo te amo para comenzar a amarte,para recomenzar el infinitoy para no dejar de amarte nunca:por eso no te amo todavía.
Pablo Neruda