Roberto Quotes & Sayings

In short, Roberto privately concluded, if you would avoid wars, never make treaties of peace. — Umberto Eco

The power worship of the Promethean amounts to a travesty of the enhancement of life. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

You can't stop the Dark Push. — Roberto Trotta

The most important rule is to formulate, clearly and precisely, the goal to be reached, and then to retain it unswervingly in mind throughout all the stages of the execution, which are often long and complex. — Roberto Assagioli

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar. — Roberto Bolano

The road to wealth is sown with false starts and failures that should in no way discourage the poor who make good or our neighbors with new found riches. We have to give it our all. — Roberto Bolano

In real life, according to McNamara, the leader first must discover the problem. He or she must figure out what problem needs to be solved before beginning to make decisions. McNamara explained that identifying the true problem facing an organization often proved to be the most difficult challenge that leaders face. In many instances leaders do not spot a threat until far too late. At times, leaders set out to solve the wrong problem. — Michael A. Roberto

From a still wider and more comprehensive point of view, universal life itself appears to us as a struggle between multiplicity and unity - a labor and an aspiration towards union. We seem to sense that - whether we conceive it as a divine Being or as a cosmic energy - the Spirit working upon and within all creation is shaping it into order, harmony, and beauty, uniting all beings (some willing but the majority as yet blind and rebellious) with each other through links of love, achieving - slowly and silently, but powerfully and irresistibly - the Supreme Synthesis. — Roberto Assagioli

John Hirschbeck is a wonderful person with a wonderful family. I'm so glad that we have become friends. — Roberto Alomar

I like being an editor, and I know how to make a magazine. — Roberto Civita

I learn much more by traveling by myself. — Roberto Cavalli

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. — Roberto Bolano

The moon is fat and the night air is so pure it seems edible. — Roberto Bolano

Do you know what the worst thing about literature is? . What? I said. That you end up being friends with writers. And friendship, treasure though it may be, destroys your critical sense. Once, said Don Pancracio, Monteforte Toledo dropped this riddle in my lap: a poet is lost in a city on the verge of collapse, with no money, or friends, or anyone to turn to. And of course, he neither wants nor plans to turn to anyone. For several days he roams the city and the country, eating nothing, or eating scraps. He's even stopped writing. Or he writes in his head: in other words, he hallucinates. All signs point to an imminent death. His drastic disappearance foreshadows it. And yet the poet doesn't die. — Roberto Bolano

And I thought:History is like a horror story. — Roberto Bolano

reliquary of time — Roberto Pinchas

So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely. — Roberto Bolano

If volition is bound to social imperatives, as William James believed, and it's therefore easier to go to war than it is to quit smoking, one could say that Liz Norton was a woman who found it easier to quit smoking than to go to war. — Roberto Bolano

According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next. — Roberto Bolano

When you die of sorrow it's as if you've broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That's sorrow. — Roberto Bolano

He was an atheist and it had been years since he read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself. — Roberto Bolano

But just then, as if to avoid a certain awkwardness, Seaman began to talk not about Newell but about Newell's mother, Anne Jordan Newell. He described her appearance (pleasing), her work (she had a job at a factory that made irrigation systems), her faith (she went to church every Sunday), her industriousness (she kept the house as neat as a pin), her kindness (she always had a smile for everyone), her common sense (she gave good advice, wise advice, without forcing it on anyone). A mother is a precious thing, concluded Seaman. Marius and I founded the Panthers. We worked whatever jobs we could get and we bought shotguns and handguns for the people's self-defense. But a mother is worth more than the Black Revolution. That I can promise you. In my long and eventful life, I've seen many things. I was in Algeria and I was in China and in several prisons in the United States. A mother is a precious thing. This I say here and I'll say anywhere, anytime, he said in a hoarse voice. — Roberto Bolano

Used in a personal sense, the phrase 'achieve an end' seemed to her a small-minded snare. She preferred the word life, and, on rare occasions, happiness. — Roberto Bolano

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 Bolano

But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie. — Roberto Bolano

Like a cross between Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions and Janice Lee's Damnation, The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing is at once smart and slyly unsettling. It is expert at creating a quietly building sense of dread while claiming to do something as straightforward as describe lost films - like those conversations you have in which you realize only too late that what you actually talking about and what you think you are talking about are not the same thing at all. With Rombes, Two Dollar Radio deftly demonstrates why it is rapidly becoming the go-to press for innovative fiction. — Brian Evenson

They fucked until she was nothing more than a tremor in his arms. — Roberto Bolano

Literature isn't innocent. I've known that since I was fifteen. — Roberto Bolano

And quick strokes of other less intimate adventures
Flashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies. — Roberto Bolano

I meet people, I like to ask: which sign are you? — Roberto Cavalli

I do think you are mainly thrown into one medium as an actor, and then hopefully you grow from there. — Roberto Aguire

Then they talked about freedom and evil, about the highways of freedom where evil is like a Ferrari. — Roberto Bolano

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you'll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You'll find it when you need it most,
and that won't be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you'll remember me,
if only just a little. — Roberto Bolano

My mother and my father went to the cinema for the first time when I made my first movie in 1978. — Roberto Benigni

The great thing about NYU, and the reason I chose to go there, was the fact that they don't inhibit you as an actor and tell you, 'You only have to study acting. This is it for the rest of your life.' They're really great at balancing other things; you get to study two days a week anything you want unrelated to acting. — Roberto Aguire

You can't force an audience to see something they don't want to see, no matter what it is. — Roberto Orci

If life is misery, why do we endure it? — Roberto Bolano

We are dominated by everything with which our self is identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we disidentify ourselves. The normal mistake we all make is to identify ourselves with some content of consciousness rather than with consciousness itself. Some people get their identity from their feelings, others from their thoughts, others from their social roles. But this identification with a part of the personality destroys the freedom which comes from the experience of the pure "I". — Roberto Assagioli

I really feel that if it wasn't for the accident, I'd still be fighting. I would have handled some of these fighters. I would have made sure that the doctors would have declared me physically sound; and after that, I would have trained. — Roberto Duran

Hen Anne stopped and talked to me for the first time. I can't remember what we said, maybe our names and where we came from. at the end of the conversation I invited her to dinner at my house that night. It was Christmastime, or nearly, and I made a pizza and bought a bottle of wine. We talked until very late. That was when Anne told me she'd been to Mexico several times. Overall, her adventures were very similar to mine. Anne thought this was because the lives or the youths of any two individuals would be fundamentally alike, in spite of the obvious or even glaring differences. I preferred to think that somehow she and I had both explored the same map, fought the same doomed campaigns, received a common sentimental education. At five in the morning, or perhaps later, we went to med and made love. — Roberto Bolano

I prefer to not say anything, she wrote, there's no point adding to the pain, or adding our own little mysteries to it. As if the pain itself were not enough of a mystery, as if the pain were not the (mysterious) answer to all mysteries. — Roberto Bolano

Dreams fade with morning light, Never a morn for thee, Dreamer of dreams, goodnight. — Roberto Bolano

We cannot look backwards. What we have to do is raise our heads, look forward, roll up our sleeves and work. — Roberto Azevedo

The most obvious problem with estimating a dummy dependent variable model using OLS is that the predicted probabilities aren't guaranteed — Roberto Pedace

In the immortal words of Roberto Duran, we are saying, 'No mas!' We will educate students and then promote them, not the reverse — Joel Klein

A person could be immensely happy reading only him or the writers he loved. But that would be too easy. — Roberto Bolano

I hope you die, I said. I hope I die, he said, and then he said: I know I'm going to die. — Roberto Bolano

If you have an opportunity to make things better and you don't then you are wasting your time on earth — Roberto Clemente Cancel

Dust and literature have always gone hand in hand. — Roberto Bolano

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage. — Roberto Bolano

And then we would leave, and by that time it would already be dark, and as we headed to the bus or the subway or went walking home, we would eat our sandwiches, enjoying the Mexico City night, which I've always thought is gorgeous, the nights here are mostly cool and bright but not cold, nights made for walking or fucking, nights made for talking. — Roberto Bolano

Remember, changing someone's hang-ups is an easier task if stays in the realm of sex because the carrot at the end of this trip is - SEX! It's not so easy to change other aspects of a man's personality because the rewards aren't as apparent and you can't exactly screw the stupid out of someone. — Roberto Hogue

I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it. — Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

You run risks. That's the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny's whims. — Roberto Bolano

I haven't read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could've read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I don't mean every single book, good and bad, just the good ones. There must be stacks of them! Enough that you could spend twenty-four hours a day reading! And that's not to mention the bad ones, since there must be more bad ones than good ones, and at least a few of those, like anything, must be good and worth reading. — Roberto Bolano

He (Roberto Clemente) is a hero to me. — Sammy Sosa

My dream, maybe because of my family, of course, was to be a painter. I chose in one moment the direction of textiles; from textiles I went to fashion. — Roberto Cavalli

For a while we talked about things I've forgotten now. Or maybe we were silent for a while, me sitting at the foot of his bed, him stretched out with his book, the two of us sneaking looks at each other, listening to the sound the elevator made, as if we were in a dark room or lost in the country at night, just listening to the sound of horses. — Roberto Bolano

Brazil has no future as a China with fewer people. — Roberto Unger

To be in front of an audience and pretending, and to lie, this is the principle of acting. — Roberto Benigni

With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility. — Roberto Bolano

Once you lose everything, what's the worst that's going to happen to you? You develop a self-assurance. — Roberto Goizueta

My mother brought me magicians and witches, because I was very ugly, really revolting. So she thought somebody had put a spell on me - this is the truth - so she made me drink some horrible terrifying potions, for year. — Roberto Benigni

Still I kept walking. I walked and walked. And from time to time I stopped and said to myself: Wake up, Auxilio. Nobody can endure this. And yet I knew I could endure it. So I baptized my right leg Willpower and my left leg Necessity. And I endured. — Roberto Bolano

The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower. — Roberto Bolano

In a word, and bluntly: as they walked around Sankt Pauli, it came to Pelletier and Espinoza that the search for Archimboldi could never fill their lives. They could read him, they could study him, they could pick him apart, but they couldn't laugh or be sad with him, partly because Archimboldi was always far away, partly because the deeper they went into his work, the more it devoured its explorers. In a word: in Sankt Pauli and later at Mrs. Bubis's house, hung with photographs of the late Mr. Bubis and his writers, Pelletier and Espinoza understood that what they wanted to make was love, not war. — Roberto Bolano

[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 Bolano

The creation of conditions by which an entire people who have lived in exploitation and illiteracy gains access to the highest levels of knowledge and creativity is one of the most beautiful achievements of a revolution. — Roberto Fernandez Retamar

Yeah, take it from me. He may try to sell himself to you along with the company. And then there is Roberto, the CEO of our acquisition target. He also seems to be a bit of a flirt. Those two are like moths around a light bulb with you. Any idea how you would react if they both came after you? — Karynne Summars

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism. — Roberto Rossellini

The first movie I saw - and I don't know if it influenced me - was Ben Hur. We watched it outside in a corn field, and it ran backwards, so the first movie I ever saw was Ben Hur backwards. — Roberto Benigni

Maybe sometimes I have been wrong with some movies. Anyway, I try to do my best. — Roberto Benigni

I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy. — Roberto Benigni

Snow has turned the world into a cemetery.
But the world already was a cemetery
and the snow has only come to announce it. — Roberto Juarroz

Some dudes just know what they know, and they are fine with it. They might obsess with sex as much as you do, but never really explore some of the more advanced topics. These guys need their horizons expanded and you are just the girl to do it for him. — Roberto Hogue

If I would be happy, I would be a very bad ball player. With me, when I get mad, it puts energy in my body. — Roberto Clemente

We have to learn how to work within the limits that are possible, not what is desirable. — Roberto Azevedo

I'm persuaded today that the only way you can get into another country with a different culture from your own is to find a local partner who knows the market. Discovering this felt like small children discovering that if you put a bobby pin into an electric plug you get a shock! — Roberto Civita

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. — Roberto Bolano

Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

When I go to a restaurant and they say, 'We're fully booked,' I say, 'It's Roberto Cavalli,' and they say, 'I will check'. I love it! — Roberto Cavalli

The visitor enters and says, "What a lot of books! Have you read them all?" ... The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: "And more, dear sir, many more," which freezes the adversary and plunges him into a state of awed admiration. But I find it merciless and angst-generating. Now I have fallen back on the riposte: "No, these are the ones I have to read by the end of the month. I keep the others in my office. — Umberto Eco

It is important to be chic. — Roberto Cavalli

Those Yalta nights, with extraordinary women who could drink vodka without swooning until six in the morning and sweaty young people from the Association of Proletarian Writers of Crimea who came to ask for literary advice at four in the afternoon. — Roberto Bolano

Glorious sex that poets write about and that angels blow their trumpets over absolutely requires the participants to be fully engaged and fully witnessing the entire event! — Roberto Hogue

In the evening every man looks the same. Like penguins. Women have a special dress for that event; men, the same tuxedo. — Roberto Cavalli

Our dominant idea about the mind fail to recognise the conflict between the two sides of the mind - the mind as machine and the mind as anti-machine, delighting in its powers of combination and transgression. They fail as well to appreciate the extend to which the relative presence of these two sides of the mind is influenced by the organisation of society and of the culture, with the result that the history of politics is internal to the history of the mind. In these as in many other respects, our beliefs about ourselves resist acknowledging the relation between our context-shaped and our context-transcending identities and powers. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

I think what helps me is that delegations of all sizes - the small, the medium, the large, the largest - they all have seen me in action. They all have seen me unlocking blockages, unlocking impasses for several years now, and they all know that ... I can bring a constructive mood to the table. — Roberto Azevedo

One-third of all professional baseball players come from Latin America, and Sosa is following role models such as the late Roberto Clemente, a Puerto Rican, from whom he adopted the No. 21. Now he is a model for others. — Bill Dedman

I love women in all their different incarnations. My friends are practically all women. They are much more intelligent than men. — Roberto Cavalli

(Roberto) Clemente could field the ball in New York and throw out a guy in Pennsylvania. — Vin Scully

I love being a fashion designer. — Roberto Cavalli

What is a look of absolute fear? Popescu asked. The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles untile he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear. — Roberto Bolano

They talk but their words don't register on the soundtrack. Anyway, they must be saying things like how was your day, I'm tired, there's an avocado sandwich in the kitchen, thanks, thanks, a beer in the refrigerator. — Roberto Bolano

It's absurd to see an enchanted princess in every girl who walks by. What do you think you are, a troubadour? — Roberto Bolano

He faces the burdens of belittlement a third time as he grows older, and settles into an existence that he has embraced, or that has been forced upon him. A carapace of routine, of compromise, of silent surrenders, of half-term solutions, and of diminished consciousness begins to form around him. He turns himself over to the rigidified version of the self: the character. He begins to die small deaths, many times over. He fails to die only once, which is what he would desire if he were able fully to recognize the value of life. This third encounter with belittlement reveals belittlement for what it in fact is: death by installments. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Leopard is an animal design, and my designs come from nature. — Roberto Cavalli

If somebody for some reason, for music or for movie, becomes famous, it's because they have something, something special. — Roberto Cavalli

Right now you can cry and let your image dissolve
on the windshields of cars parked along
the Boardwalk. But you can't lose yourself. — Roberto Bolano

When did it all begin? he thought. When did I go under? A dark, vaguely familiar Aztec lake. The nightmare. How do I get away? How do I take control? And the questions kept coming: Was getting away what he really wanted? Did he really want to leave it all behind? And he also thought: the pain doesn't matter anymore. And also: maybe it all began with my mother's death. And also: the pain doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't get any worse, as long as it isn't unbearable. And also: fuck, it hurts, fuck, it hurts. Pay it no mind, pay it no mind. And all around him, ghosts. — Roberto Bolano