Quote by Roberto Bolaño

“The root of all my ills, thought Amalfitano sometimes, is my admiration for Jews, homosexuals, and revolutionaries (true revo-lutionaries, the romantics and the dangerous madmen, not the apparatchiks of the Communist Party of Chile or its despicable thugs, those hideous gray beings. The root of all my ills, he thought, is my admiration for a certain kind of junkie (not the poet junkie or the artist junkie but the straight-up junkie, the kind you rarely come across, the kind who almost literally gnaws at himself, the kind like a black hole or a black eye, with no hands or legs, a black eye that never opens or closes, the Lost Witness of the Tribe, the kind who seems to cling to drugs in the same way that drugs cling to him. The root of all my ills is my admiration for delinquents, whores, the mentally disturbed, said Amalfitano to himself with bitterness. When I was an adolescent I wanted to be a Jew, a Bol-shevik, black, homosexual, a junkie, half-crazy, and the crowning touch- a one-armed amputee, but all I became was a literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels. (The Poets, in Amalfitano's view, were those beings who flashed like lightning bolts, and the Novels were the stories that sprang from Don Quixote). At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful.”

Quote by Roberto Bolaño