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In Vain Have Oceans Been Squandered On You, In Vain The Sun, Wonderfully Seen Through Whitman’s Eyes. You Have Used Up The Years And They Have Used Up You, And Still, And Still, You Have Not Written The Poem.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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In Vain Have Oceans

Jorge Luis Borges

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In Vain Have Oceans Been Squandered On You, In Vain The Sun, Wonderfully Seen Through Whitman’s Eyes. You Have Used Up The Years And They Have Used Up You, And Still, And Still, You Have Not Written The Poem.

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I Saw All The Mirrors On Earth And None Of Them Reflected Me.

Literature Is Not Exhaustible, For The Sufficient And Simple Reason That A Single Book Is Not.

Personally, I Am A Hedonistic Reader; I Have Never Read A Book Merely Because It Was Ancient. I Read Books For The Aesthetic Emotions They Offer Me, And I Ignore The Commentaries And Criticism.

What I'm Really Concerned About Is Reaching One Person. And That Person May Be Myself For All I Know.

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

We Accept Reality So Readily - Perhaps Because We Sense That Nothing Is Real.

I Try To Avoid Purple Patches, Fine Writing, All That Kind Of Thing... Because I Think They're A Mistake. And Then Sometimes It Comes Through And Sometimes It Doesn't, But That's Not Up To Me. It's Up To Chance.

I Might Accept Immortality, If I Had To Do It. But I Would Prefer - If There Is Any Afterlife - To Know Nothing Whatever About Borges, About His Experiences In This World.

It Seemed Incredible That This Day, A Day Without Warnings Or Omens, Might Be That Of My Implacable Death.

Truly Fine Poetry Must Be Read Aloud. A Good Poem Does Not Allow Itself To Be Read In A Low Voice Or Silently. If We Can Read It Silently, It Is Not A Valid Poem: A Poem Demands Pronunciation. Poetry Always Remembers That It Was An Oral Art Before It Was A Written Art. It Remembers That It Was First Song.

The Art Of Writing Is Mysterious; The Opinions We Hold Are Ephemeral , And I Prefer The Platonic Idea Of The Muse To That Of Poe, Who Reasoned, Or Feigned To Reason, That The Writing Of A Poem Is An Act Of The Intelligence. It Never Fails To Amaze Me That The Classics Hold A Romantic Theory Of Poetry, And A Romantic Poet A Classical Theory.

My Father Gave Me Free Run Of His Library. When I Think Of My Boyhood, I Think In Terms Of The Books I Read.

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

On Those Remote Pages [of 'a Certain Chinese Encyclopedia'] It Is Written That Animals Are Divided Into (a) Those That Belong To The Emperor, (b) Embalmed Ones, (c) Those That Are Trained, (d) Suckling Pigs, (e) Mermaids, (f ) Fabulous Ones, (g) Stray Dogs, (h) Those That Are Included In This Classification, (i) Those That Tremble As If They Were Mad, (j) Innumerable Ones, (k) Those Drawn With A Very Fine Camel's Hair Brush, (l) Others, (m) Those That Have Just Broken A Flower Vase, (n) Those That Resemble Flies From A Distance.

It Is Worth Remembering That Every Writer Begins With A Naively Physical Notion Of What Art Is. A Book For Him Or Her Is Not An Expression Or A Series Of Expressions, But Literally A Volume, A Prism With Six Rectangular Sides Made Of Thin Sheets Of Papers Which Should Include A Cover, An Inside Cover, An Epigraph In Italics, A Preface, Nine Or Ten Parts With Some Verses At The Beginning, A Table Of Contents, An Ex Libris With An Hourglass And A Latin Phrase, A Brief List Of Errata, Some Blank Pages, A Colophon And A Publication Notice: Objects That Are Known To Constitute The Art Of Writing.

I Would Define The Baroque As That Style That Deliberately Exhausts (or Tries To Exhaust) Its Own Possibilities, And That Borders On Self-caricature. The Baroque Is The Final Stage In All Art, When Art Flaunts And Squanders Its Resources.

We Forget That We Are All Dead Men Conversing With Dead Men.

Time Forks Perpetually Toward Innumerable Futures.

He Thought That The Rose Was To Be Found In Its Own Eternity And Not In His Words; And That We May Mention Or Allude To A Thing, But Not Express It.

Blindness Has Not Been For Me A Total Misfortune; It Should Not Be Seen In A Pathetic Way. It Should Be Seen As A Way Of Life: One Of The Styles Of Living.

I Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

Time Can't Be Measured In Days The Way Money Is Measured In Pesos And Centavos, Because All Pesos Are Equal, While Every Day, Perhaps Every Hour, Is Different.

What Man Of Us Has Never Felt, Walking Through The Twilight Or Writing Down A Date From His Past, That He Has Lost Something Infinite?

There Are Those Who Seek The Love Of A Woman To Forget Her, To Not Think About Her.

In All Fiction, When A Man Is Faced With Alternatives He Chooses One At The Expense Of Others.

What Will Die With Me When I Die, What Pathetic Or Fragile Form Will The World Lose?

It Also Occurred To Him That Throughout History, Humankind Has Told Two Stories: The Story Of A Lost Ship Sailing The Mediterranean Seas In Quest Of A Beloved Isle, And The Story Of A God Who Allows Himself To Be Crucified On Golgotha.

I Don't Think I Can Really Believe In Doomsday; I Could Hardly Believe In Rewards And Punishments, In Heaven Or Hell. As I Wrote Down In One Of My Sonnets - I Seem To Be Always Plagiarizing, Imitating Myself Or Somebody Else For That Matter - I Think I Am Quite Unworthy Of Heaven Or Of Hell, And Even Of Immortality.

Best Thing To Happen For A Poet. A Fine Death, No? An Impressive Death.

In The Order Of Literature, As In Others, There Is No Act That Is Not The Coronation Of An Infinite Series Of Causes And The Source Of An Infinite Series Of Effects.

You Don't Have To Try To Be Contemporary. You Are Already Contemporary. What One Has In Mythology Is Being Evolved All The Time. Personally, I Think I Can Do With Greek And Old Norse Mythology. For Example, I Don't Think I Stand In Need Of Planes Or Of Railways Or Of Cars.

The Task Of Art Is To Transform What Is Continuously Happening To Us, To Transform All Of These Things Into Symbols, Into Music, Into Something Which Can Last In Man’s Memory. That Is Our Duty. If We Don’t Fulfill It, We Feel Unhappy.

The Flattery Of Posterity Is Not Worth Much More Than Contemporary Flattery, Which Is Worth Nothing.

On The Floor, And Hanging On To The Bar, Squatted An Old Man, Immobile As An Object. His Years Had Reduced And Polished Him As Water Does A Stone Or The Generations Of Men Do A Sentence.

There's No Need To Build A Labyrinth When The Entire Universe Is One.

I Have Committed The Worst Of Sins One Can Commit... I Have Not Been Happy.

I Can’t Talk About My Books. I Have Written Them And Tried To Forget Them. I Have Written Once, And Readers Have Read Me Many Times, No? I Try To Think Of What I Wrote, It’s Very Unhealthy To Think About The Past, The Case Of Elegies Is Very Sad, As Much As The Case Of Complaints.

I Do Not Write For A Select Minority, Which Means Nothing To Me, Nor For That Adulated Platonic Entity Known As ‘the Masses’. Both Abstractions, So Dear To The Demagogue, I Disbelieve In. I Write For Myself And For My Friends, And I Write To Ease The Passing Of Time.

The Execution Was Set For The 29th Of March, At Nine In The Morning. This Delay Was Due To A Desire On The Part Of The Authorities To Act Slowly And Impersonally, In The Manner Of Planets Or Vegetables.

There Is No Point In Being Overwhelmed By The Appalling Total Of Human Sufferring; Such A Total Does Not Exist. Neither Poverty Nor Pain Is Accumulable.

Islam Asserts That On The Unappealable Day Of Judgment Every Perpetrator Of The Image Of A Living Creature Will Be Raised From The Dead With His Works, And He Will Be Commanded To Bring Them To Life, And He Will Fail, And Be Cast Out With Them Into The Fires Of Punishment.

It Only Takes Two Facing Mirrors To Build A Labyrinth.

To Say Good-bye Is To Deny Separation; It Is To Say Today We Play At Going Our Own Ways, But We'll See Each Other Tomorrow. Men Invented Farewells Because They Somehow Knew Themselves To Be Immortal, Even While Seeing Themselves As Contingent And Ephemeral.

Time Is The Substance Of Which We Are Made

It Seemed Incredible To Me That Day Without Premonitions Or Symbols Should Be The One Of My Inexorable Death .

Emma Dropped The Paper. Her First Impression Was Of A Weak Feeling In Her Stomach And In Her Knees; Then Of Blind Guilt, Of Unreality, Of Coldness, Of Fear; Then She Wished That It Were Already The Next Day. Immediately Afterwards She Realized That That Wish Was Futile Because The Death Of Her Father Was The Only Thing That Had Happened In The World, And It Would Go On Happening Endlessly.

I Gazed At Every Mirror On The Planet, Not One Gave Back My Reflection.

Self Improvement

Reading Is An Activity Subsequent To Writing: More Resigned, More Civil, More Intellectual.

Everything Touches Everything.

All That Happens To Us, Including Our Humiliations, Our Misfortunes, Our Embarrassments, All Is Given To Us As Raw Material, As Clay, So That We May Shape Our Art.

All Theories Are Legitimate, No Matter. What Matters Is What You Do With Them.

One Concept Corrupts And Confuses The Others. I Am Not Speaking Of The Evil Whose Limited Sphere Is Ethics; I Am Speaking Of The Infinite.

My Advanced Age Has Taught Me The Resignation Of Being Borges.

The Original Is Unfaithful To The Translation.

Reality May Avoid The Obligation To Be Interesting, But ... Hypotheses May Not.

The Thought Came Over Me That Never Would One Full And Absolute Moment, Containing All The Others, Justify My Life, That All Of My Instants Would Be Provisional Phases, Annihilators Of The Past Turned To Face The Future, And That Beyond The Episodic, The Present, The Circumstantial, We Were Nobody.

That Is What Always Happens: We Never Know Whether We Are Victors Or Whether We Are Defeated.

Loneliness Does Not Worry Me; Life Is Difficult Enough, Putting Up With Yourself And With Your Own Habits.

I Cannot Walk Through The Suburbs In The Solitude Of The Night Without Thinking That The Night Pleases Us Because It Suppresses Idle Details, Just As Our Memory Does.

I Think Of Myself Primarily As A Reader, Then Also A Writer, But That's More Or Less Irrelevant. I Think I'm A Good Reader, I'm A Good Reader In Many Languages, Especially In English, Since Poetry Came To Me Through The English Language, Initially Through My Father's Love Of Swinburn, Of Tennyson, And Also Of Keats, Shelley And So On - Not Through My Native Tongue, Not Through Spanish. It Came To Me As A Kind Of Spell. I Didn't Understand It, But I Felt It.

The People Of Tlön Are Taught That The Act Of Counting Modifies The Amount Counted, Turning Indefinites Into Definites. The Fact That Several Persons Counting The Same Quantity Come To The Same Result Is For The Psychologists Of Tlön An Example Of The Association Of Ideas Or Of Memorization.

The Time For Your Labor Has Been Granted.

The Visible Universe Was An Illusion Or, More Precisely, A Sophism. Mirrors And Fatherhood Are Abominable Because They Multiply It And Extend It.

A Writer Needs Loneliness, And He Gets His Share Of It. He Needs Love, And He Gets Shared And Also Unshared Love. He Needs Friendship. In Fact, He Needs The Universe. To Be A Writer Is, In A Sense, To Be A Day-dreamer - To Be Living A Kind Of Double Life.

Israelites, Christians And Muslims Profess Immortality, But The Veneration They Render This World Proves They Believe Only In It, Since They Destine All Other Worlds, In Infinite Number, To Be Its Reward Or Punishment.

The Future Has No Other Reality Than As Present Hope, And The Past Is No More Than Present Memory.

Heaven And Hell Seem Out Of Proportion To Me: The Actions Of Men Do Not Deserve So Much.

To Arrange A Library Is To Practice In A Quiet And Modest Way The Art Of Criticism.

For Myth Is At The Beginning Of Literature, And Also At Its End.

We Have Stopped Believing In Progress. What Progress That Is !

If Space Is Infinite, We May Be At Any Point In Space. If Time Is Infinite, We May Be At Any Point In Time.

The Word Happiness Exists In Every Language; It Is Plausible The Thing Itself Exists.

I...have Always Known That My Destiny Was, Above All, A Literary Destiny — That Bad Things And Some Good Things Would Happen To Me, But That, In The Long Run, All Of It Would Be Converted Into Words. Particularly The Bad Things, Since Happiness Does Not Need To Be Transformed: Happiness Is Its Own End.

In The Critic's Vocabulary, The Word "precursor" Is Indispensable, But It Should Be Cleansed Of All Connotations Of Polemic Or Rivalry. The Fact Is That Every Writer Creates His Own Precursors. His Work Modifies Our Conception Of The Past, As It Will Modify The Future." -- Essay: "kafka And His Precursors

If I Were Asked To Name The Chief Event In My Life, I Should Say My Father's Library.

I Came To The Idea Of How Fine It Would Be To Think Of An Encyclopedia Of An Actual World, And Then Of An Encyclopedia, A Very Rigorous One Of Course, Of An Imaginary World, Where Everything Should Be Linked.

Time Is A Fire That Consumes Me, But I Am The Fire.

Time Management

Your Unforgivable Sins Do Not Allow You To See My Splendor.

Unforgivable Sin

I Am Not Sure That I Exist, Actually. I Am All The Writers That I Have Read, All The People That I Have Met, All The Women That I Have Loved; All The Cities I Have Visited.

Every Writer Creates His Own Precursors. His Work Modifies Our Conception Of The Past, As It Will Modify The Future.

From My Weakness, I Drew Strength That Never Left Me.

I Secretly Assumed, As Poets Do, The Duty On Me To Define The Moon.

The Mathematical Sciences Wield Their Particular Language Made Of Digits And Signs, No Less Subtle Than Any Other.

In Adultery, There Is Usually Tenderness And Self-sacrifice; In Murder, Courage; In Profanation And Blasphemy, A Certain Satanic Splendour. Judas Elected Those Offences Unvisited By Any Virtues: Abuse Of Confidence And Informing.

My Books Standing There On The Shelf Do Not Know That I Have Written Them.

Sometimes, Looking At The Many Books I Have At Home, I Feel I Shall Die Before I Come To The End Of Them, Yet I Cannot Resist The Temptation Of Buying New Books. Whenever I Walk Into A Bookstore And Find A Book On One Of My Hobbies — For Example, Old English Or Old Norse Poetry — I Say To Myself, “what A Pity I Can’t Buy That Book, For I Already Have A Copy At Home.

People Think That I've Committed Myself To Idealism, To Solipsism, Or To Doctrines Of The Cabala, Because I've Used Them In My Tales. But Really I Was Only Trying To See What Could Be Done With Them. On The Other Hand, It Might Be Argued That If I Use Them It's Because I Was Feeling An Affinity To Them. Of Course, That's True.

Many People Have Thought Of Me As A Thinker, As A Philosopher, Or Even As A Mystic. Well The Truth Is That Though I Have Found Reality Perplexing Enough - In Fact, I Find It Gets More Perplexing All The Time - I Never Think Of Myself As A Thinker.

Translations Are A Partial And Precious Documentation Of The Changes The Text Suffers.

Unlike The Novel, A Short Story May Be, For All Purposes, Essential.

I Don't Think We're Capable Of Knowledge, But I Like To Keep An Open Mind. So If You Ask Me Whether I Believe In An Afterlife Or Not, Whether I Believe In God Or Not, I Can Only Answer You That All Things Are Possible. And If All Things Are Possible, Heaven And Hell And The Angels Are Also Possible. They're Not To Be Ruled Out.

I Live In A Grey World, Rather Like The Silver Screen World. But Yellow Stands Out.

Chang Tzu Tells Us Of A Persevering Man Who After Three Laborious Years Mastered The Art Of Dragon-slaying. For The Rest Of His Days, He Had Not A Single Opportunity To Test His Skills.

A . . . Poet Is A Discoverer Rather Than An Inventor.

Im Merely A Dreamer, And Then A Writer, And My Happiest Moments Are When I'm A Reader.

There Is A Concept Which Corrupts And Upsets All Others. I Refer Not To Evil, Whose Limited Realm Is That Of Ethics; I Refer To The Infinite.

This Felicitous Supposition Declared That There Is Only One Individual, And That This Indivisible Individual Is Every One Of The Separate Beings In The Universe, And That These Beings Are The Instruments And Masks Of Divinity Itself.

I Have No Way Of Knowing Whether The Events That I Am About To Narrate Are Effects Or Causes.

His Life, Measured In Space And Time, Will Take Up A Mere Few Lines, Which My Ignorance Will Abbreviate Further.

Lully's Machine, Mill's Fear And Lasswitz's Chaotic Library Can Be The Subject Of Jokes, But They Exaggerate A Propensity Which Is Common: Making Metaphysics And The Arts Into A Kind Of Play With Combinations.

In Spanish It Is Very Difficult To Make Things Flow, Because Words Are Over-long. But In English, You Have Light Words.

It May Be That Universal History Is The History Of The Different Intonations Given A Handful Of Metaphors.

Poets, Like The Blind, Can See In The Dark.

In Truth, The Library Includes All Verbal Structures, All Variations Permitted By The Twenty-five Orthographical Symbols, But Not A Single Example Of Absolute Nonsense.

Mir Bahadur Ali Is, As We Have Seen, Incapable Of Evading The Most Vulgar Of Art's Temptations: That Of Being A Genius.

The Fact Is That Poetry Is Not The Books In The Library . . . Poetry Is The Encounter Of The Reader With The Book, The Discovery Of The Book.

I Have Sometimes Suspected That The Only Thing That Holds No Mystery Is Happiness, Because It Is Its Own Justification.

The Dictionary Is Based On The Hypothesis -- Obviously An Unproven One -- That Languages Are Made Up Of Equivalent Synonyms.

What You Really Value Is What You Miss, Not What You Have.

As To My Writing Short Pieces, There Are Two Reasons I Can Give You. The First Is My Invincible Laziness. The Second Is That I've Always Been Fond Of Short Stories, And It Always Took Me Some Trouble To Get Through A Novel.

We Are Our Memory, We Are That Chimerical Museum Of Shifting Shapes, That Pile Of Broken Mirrors.

The Minotaur More Than Justifies The Existence Of The Labyrinth.

God Must Not Engage In Theology. The Writer Must Not Destroy By Human Reasonings The Faith That Art Requires Of Us.

The Poverty Of Yesterday Was Less Squalid Than The Poverty We Purchase With Our Industry Today. Fortunes Were Smaller Then As Well.

He Was Very Religious; He Believed That He Had A Secret Pact With God Which Exempted Him From Doing Good In Exchange For Prayers And Piety.

The Mind Was Dreaming. The World Was Its Dream.

Days And Nights Passed Over This Despair Of Flesh, But One Morning He Awoke, Looked (with Calm Now) At The Blurred Things That Lay About Him, And Felt, Inexplicably, The Way One Might Feel Upon Recognizing A Melody Or A Voice, That All This Had Happened To Him Before And That He Had Faced It With Fear But Also With Joy And Hopefulness And Curiosity. Then He Descended Into His Memory, Which Seemed To Him Endless, And Managed To Draw Up From That Vertigo The Lost Remembrance That Gleamed Like A Coin In The Rain - Perhaps Because He Had Never Really Looked At It Except (perhaps) In A Dream.

The Man Who Has Learned That Three Plus One Are Four Doesn't Have To Go Through A Proof Of That Assertion With Coins, Or Dice, Or Chess Pieces, Or Pencils. He Knows It, And That's That. He Cannot Conceive A Different Sum. There Are Mathematicians Who Say That Three Plus One Is A Tautology For Four, A Different Way Of Saying "four" ... If Three Plus One Can Be Two, Or Fourteen, Then Reason Is Madness.

The Possibilities Of The Art Of Combination Are Not Infinite, But They Tend To Be Frightful.

To Fall In Love Is To Create A Religion That Has A Fallible God.

Dictatorships Foster Oppression, Dictatorships Foster Servitude, Dictatorships Foster Cruelty; More Abominable Is The Fact That They Foster Idiocy.

Many Of The Characters Are Fools And They're Always Playing Tricks On Me And Treating Me Badly.

Why Do You Seem So Annoyed At What I'm Saying?" "because We're Too Much Like Each Other. I Loathe Your Face, Which Is A Caricature Of Mine, I Loathe Your Voice, Which Is A Mockery Of Mine, I Loathe Your Pathetic Syntax, Which Is My Own.

I Don't Think There's Any Essential Difference, At Least For Me, Between Writing Poetry And Writing Prose.

We Are As Ignorant Of The Meaning Of The Dragon As We Are Of The Meaning Of The Universe.

Don't Talk Unless You Can Improve The Silence.

Time, Which Despoils Castles, Enriches Verses.

There Are No Moral Or Intellectual Merits. Homer Composed The Odyssey; If We Postulate An Infinite Period Of Time, With Infinite Circumstances And Changes, The Impossible Thing Is Not To Compose The Odyssey, At Least Once.

Impossible Things

Reality Favors Symmetry.

In Our Dreams (writes Coleridge) Images Represent The Sensations We Think They Cause; We Do Not Feel Horror Because We Are Threatened By A Sphinx; We Dream Of A Sphinx In Order To Explain The Horror We Feel.

My Father And He Had Cemented One Of Those English Friendships Which Begin By Avoiding Intimacies And Eventually Eliminate Speech Altogether.

A Writer, Or Any Man, Must Believe That Whatever Happens To Him Is An Instrument; Everything Has Been Given For An End. This Is Even Stronger In The Case Of The Artist. Everything That Happens, Including Humiliations, Embarrassments, Misfortunes, All Has Been Given Like Clay, Like Material For One's Art. One Must Accept It.

The Truth Is That We Live Out Our Lives Putting Off All That Can Be Put Off; Perhaps We All Know Deep Down That We Are Immortal And That Sooner Or Later All Men Will Do And Know All Things.

Procrastination

The Central Fact Of My Life Has Been The Existence Of Words And The Possibility Of Weaving Those Words Into Poetry.

Censorship Is The Mother Of Metaphor.

The Steps A Man Takes From The Day Of His Birth Until That Of His Death Trace In Time An Inconcievable Figure. The Divine Mind Intuitively Grasps That Form Immediately, As Men Do A Triangle.

I Will Pause To Consider This Eternity From Which The Subsequent Ones Derive.

While We Are Asleep In This World, We Are Awake In Another One

To Bless Thine Enemy Is A Good Way To Satisfy Thy Vanity.

Like All Writers, He Measured The Achievements Of Others By What They Had Accomplished, Asking Of Them That They Measure Him By What He Envisaged Or Planned.

The Mightiest Love Was Granted Him Love That Does Not Expect To Be Loved.

The Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

How Can We Manage To Illuminate The Pathos Of Our Lives?

The Aesthetic Event Is Something As Evident, As Immediate, As Indefinable As Love, The Taste Of Fruit, Of Water. We Feel Poetry As We Feel The Closeness Of A Woman, Or As We Feel A Mountain Or A Bay. If We Feel It Immediately, Why Dilute It With Other Words, Which No Doubt Will Be Weaker Than Our Feelings?

I Foresee That Man Will Resign Himself Each Day To More Atrocious Undertakings; Soon There Will Be No One But Warriors And Brigands; I Give Them This Counsel: The Author Of An Atrocious Undertaking Ought To Imagine That He Has Already Accomplished It, Ought To Impose Upon Himself A Future As Irrevocable As The Past.

I Am Interested In The Past. Perhaps One Of The Reasons Is We Cannot Make, Cannot Change The Past. I Mean You Can Hardly Unmake The Present. But The Past After All Is Merely To Say A Memory, A Dream. You Know My Own Past Seems Continually Changed When I Am Remembering It, Or Reading Things That Are Interesting To Me.

Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas.

You Will Reply That Reality Hasn't The Slightest Need To Be Of Interest. And I'll Answer You That Reality May Avoid The Obligation To Be Interesting, But That Hypotheses May Not. In The Hypothesis You Have Postulated, Chance Intervenes Largely. Here Lies A Dead Rabbi; I Should Prefer A Purely Rabbinical Explanation; Not The Imaginary Mischances Of An Imaginary Robber.

No One Is A Poet From Eight To Twelve And From Two To Six. Whoever Is A Poet Is One Always, And Continually Assaulted By Poetry.

The Future Is As Irrevocable As An Inflexible Yesterday.

You May Win Your Heart's Desire, But In The End You're Cheated Of It By Death.

Nothing Is Built On Stone; All Is Built On Sand, But We Must Build As If The Sand Were Stone.

It's A Shame That We Have To Choose Between Two Such Second-rate Countries As The Ussr And The Usa.

What A Writer Wants To Do Is Not What He Does.

The Things That Are Said In Literature Are Always The Same. What Is Important Is The Way They Are Said. Looking For Metaphors, For Example: When I Was A Young Man I Was Always Hunting For New Metaphors. Then I Found Out That Really Good Metaphors Are Always The Same.

Once I Am Dead, There Will Be No Lack Of Pious Hands To Throw Me Over The Railing; My Grave Will Be The Fathomless Air; My Body Will Sink Endlessly And Decay And Dissolve In The Wind Generated By The Fall, Which Is Infinite.

Poetry Remembers That It Was An Oral Art Before It Was A Written Art.

Let Neither Tear Nor Reproach Besmirch This Declaration Of The Mastery Of God Who, With Magnificent Irony, Granted Me Both The Gift Of Books And The Night.

The Tango Is A Direct Expression Of Something That Poets Have Often Tried To State In Words: The Belief That A Fight May Be A Celebration.

The Gods Weave Misfortunes For Men, So That The Generations To Come Will Have Something To Sing About.” Mallarmé Repeats, Less Beautifully, What Homer Said; “tout Aboutit En Un Livre,” Everything Ends Up In A Book. The Greeks Speak Of Generations That Will Sing; Mallarmé Speaks Of An Object, Of A Thing Among Things, A Book. But The Idea Is The Same; The Idea That We Are Made For Art, We Are Made For Memory, We Are Made For Poetry, Or Perhaps We Are Made For Oblivion. But Something Remains, And That Something Is History Or Poetry, Which Are Not Essentially Different.

I Know Of One Semibarbarous Zone Whose Librarians Repudiate The "vain And Superstitious Habit" Of Trying To Find Sense In Books, Equating Such A Quest With Attempting To Find Meaning In Dreams Or In The Chaotic Lines On The Palms Of One's Hand.

One Literature Differs From Another, Either Before Or After It, Not So Much Because Of The Text As For The Manner In Which It Is Read.

The Exercise Of Letters Is Sometimes Linked To The Ambition To Construct An Absolute Book, A Book Of Books That Includes The Others Like A Platonic Archetype, An Object Whose Virtues Are Not Diminished By The Passage Of Time.

In My Next Life I Will Try To Commit More Errors.

I Owe The Discovery Of Uqbar To The Conjunction Of A Mirror And An Encyclopedia.

The Art Of Writing Is Mysterious, The Opinions We Hold Are Ephemeral.

The Certainty That Everything Has Already Been Written Annuls Us, Or Renders Us Phantasmal.

I Am Almost Sure To Be Blotted Out By Death, But Sometimes I Think It Is Not Impossible That I May Continue To Live In Some Other Manner After My Physical Death . Or, As Hamlet Wonders, What Dreams Will Come When We Leave This Body?

Death Is Just Infinity Closing In.

Whoever Would Undertake Some Atrocious Enterprise Should Act As If It Were Already Accomplished Should Impose Upon Himself A Future As Irrevocable As The Past.

Writing Long Books Is A Laborious And Impoverishing Act Of Foolishness: Expanding In Five Hundred Pages An Idea That Could Be Perfectly Explained In A Few Minutes. A Better Procedure Is To Pretend That Those Books Already Exist And To Offer A Summary, A Commentary.

I Have Always Come To Life After Coming To Books.

A Man Sets Out To Draw The World. As The Years Go By, He Peoples A Space With Images Of Provinces, Kingdoms, Mountains, Bays, Ships, Islands, Fishes, Rooms, Instruments, Stars, Horses, And Individuals. A Short Time Before He Dies, He Discovers That The Patient Labyrinth Of Lines Traces The Lineaments Of His Own Face.

At The Beginning Of Their Careers Many Writers Have A Need To Overwrite. They Choose Carefully Turned-out Phrases; They Want To Impress Their Readers With Their Large Vocabularies. By The Excesses Of Their Language, These Young Men And Women Try To Hide Their Sense Of Inexperience. With Maturity The Writer Becomes More Secure In His Ideas. He Finds His Real Tone And Develops A Simple And Effective Style.

A System Is Nothing More Than The Subordination Of All Aspects Of The Universe To Any One Of Such Aspects.

Although I'm Very Lazy When It Comes To Writing, I'm Not That Lazy When It Comes To Thinking. I Like To Develop The Plan Of A Short Story, Then Cut It As Short As Possible, Try To Evolve All The Necessary Details. I Know Far More About The Characters Than What Actually Comes Out Of The Writing.

I Believe That In Time We Will Have Reached The Point Where We Will Deserve To Be Free Of Government.

He Constructed A Vast Labyrinthine Of Periods, Made Impassable By The Piling-up Of Clauses Upon Clauses-clauses In Which Oversight And Bad Grammar Seemed Manifestations Of Disdain.

I Believe Books Will Never Disappear. It Is Impossible For It To Happen. Of All Man's Diverse Tools, Undoubtedly The Most Astounding Are His Books... If Books Were To Disappear, History Would Disappear. So Would Man.

You Have Wakened Not Out Of Sleep, But Into A Prior Dream, And That Dream Lies Within Another, And So On, To Infinity, Which Is The Number Of Grains Of Sand. The Path That You Are To Take Is Endless, And You Will Die Before You Have Truly Awakened.

In Vain Have Oceans Been Squandered On You, In Vain The Sun, Wonderfully Seen Through Whitman’s Eyes. You Have Used Up The Years And They Have Used Up You, And Still, And Still, You Have Not Written The Poem.

We Have A Very Precise Image - An Image At Times Shameless - Of What We Have Lost, But We Are Ignorant Of What May Follow Or Replace It.

The Universe Is Composed Of An Indefinite And Perhaps Infinite Number Of Hexagonal Galleries.

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

I Am Not Sure Of Anything, I Know Nothing . . . Can You Imagine That I Don't Even Know The Date Of My Own Death?

I Have Always Imagined That Paradise Will Be A Kind Of Library.

Soccer Is Popular Because Stupidity Is Popular.

Nowadays, One Of The Churches Of Tlön Maintains Platonically That Such And Such A Pain, Such And Such A Greenish-yellow Colour, Such And Such A Temperature, Such And Such A Sound, Etc., Make Up The Only Reality There Is. All Men, In The Climactic Instant Of Coitus, Are The Same Man. All Men Who Repeat One Line Of Shakespeare Are William Shakespeare.

When I Write, I Do It Urged By An Intimate Necessity. I Don't Have In Mind An Exclusive Public, Or A Public Of Multitudes, I Don't Think In Either Thing. I Think About Expressing What I Want To Say. I Try To Do It In The Simplest Way Possible.

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

We (the Indivisible Divinity That Works In Us) Have Dreamed The World. We Have Dreamed It Resistant, Mysterious, Visible, Ubiquitous In Space And Firm In Time, But We Have Allowed Slight, And Eternal, Bits Of The Irrational To Form Part Of Its Architecture So As To Know That It Is False.

Like All Those Possessing A Library, Aurelian Was Aware That He Was Guilty Of Not Knowing His In Its Entirety.

I Cannot Sleep Unless I Am Surrounded By Books.

Music, Feelings Of Happiness, Mythology, Faces Worn By Time, Certain Twilights And Certain Places, Want To Tell Us Something, Or They Told Us Something That We Should Not Have Missed, Or They Are About To Tell Us Something; This Imminence Of A Revelation That Is Not Produced Is, Perhaps, The Esthetic Event.

Had I To Give Advice To Writers (and I Do Not Think They Need It, Because Everyone Has To Find Out Things For Himself), I Would Tell Them Simply This; I Would Ask Them To Tamper As Little As They Can With Their Own Work. I Do Not Think Tinkering Does Any Good. The Moment Comes When One Has Found Out What One Can Do - When One Has Found One's Natural Voice, One's Rhythm. Then I Do Not Think That Slight Emendations Should Prove Useful.

When I Wake Up, I Wake To Something Worse. It’s The Astonishment Of Being Myself

To Be Immortal Is Commonplace; Except For Man, All Creatures Are Immortal, For They Are Ignorant Of Death; What Is Divine, Terrible, Incomprehensible, Is To Know That One Is Immortal.

The Sea Is An Idiom I Cannot Decipher.

I Have Tried (i Am Not Sure How Successfully) To Write Plain Tales. I Dare Not Say They Are Simple; There Is Not A Simple Page, A Simple Word, On Earth -- For All Pages, All Words, Predicate The Universe, Whose Most Notorious Attribute Is Its Complexity.

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