Wit & Attitude Quote by Roberto Bolano

Bolano drops the polite distance between art and living with the force of a slammed door. The profanity isn’t decorative; it’s a moral accelerant, a way of refusing the reader’s favorite escape hatch: the idea that art is optional, that it sits safely behind glass while “real life” happens elsewhere. “Every single damn thing matters” is less inspirational slogan than paranoid diagnosis. In Bolano’s universe, nothing is throwaway because everything leaves a trace, and traces become evidence.

The line works because it targets a modern coping mechanism: compartmentalization. We “tell ourselves” suggests a self-administered sedative, a story we repeat to keep consequences at bay. The “one track / another” image is deceptively mundane, like a commuter map, but it’s also the infrastructure of denial. Tracks imply inevitability: you can’t easily jump from one to the other, so you stop trying. Bolano calls that separation “a lie,” not an illusion or a misunderstanding. That word choice assigns guilt. Someone benefits from the split - publishers, institutions, even artists who want the glamour without the responsibility.

Context matters: Bolano’s fiction is crowded with poets, drifters, and witnesses who treat literature as a life-or-death practice, often in the shadow of dictatorship, exile, and violence. Under those conditions, the fantasy of art as pure “aesthetic” becomes obscene. The subtext is a warning: if you pretend art is detached, you also pretend your choices are detached - from politics, from cruelty, from other people. Bolano insists the ledger is always open, and the charges always come due.