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.
Interpretation
Sorrow can feel overwhelming and physically painful, akin to severe physical injuries.
In this quote, Roberto Bolaño vividly illustrates the profound impact of sorrow on a person, comparing it to the physical agony of broken bones and bruises. He conveys that the emotional suffering of sorrow can be so intense that it manifests in bodily sensations, emphasizing the weight of grief and loss that one feels when confronted with deep sadness.
In practice
During a speech at a memorial service to express the depth of loss felt by the community.
Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.
The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.
I'd obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me).
Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.
Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.
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.
She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime.
Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time does not seem to be of the essence and somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.
My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.
I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat and drink.
For a moment, I believe, there was a stillness. A shocking realization by all things - beetles, dormice, the spiders spinning their webs in the moonlight, even the hot metal of the tracks and the wind in the trees - that Death had just shrieked past like a stinking black eagle and made off with a remarkable man.
Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful, capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us to live with the consequences of our choices.
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