from The Third Reich: the best sentence and another… do you like sentences?

They had learned to swim in the river and they believed that anyone who learned to swim in rivers could never drown in the sea. In rivers, he said, you have to swim as hard as you can and keep your mouth closed, especially if the river is radioactive.

– Roberto Bolaño, The Third Reich, trans. Natasha Wimmer, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2011, p. 41

“Are you a Nazi?” I hear her voice as I’m wiping my penis with toilet paper.

– Ibid., p. 238