Background Image

...

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.

-Jorge Luis Borges

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

The Steps A Man

Jorge Luis Borges

...

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.

Views: 6

Topic

More From Jorge Luis Borges

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.

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 Never Reread What I've Written. I'm Far Too Afraid To Feel Ashamed Of What I've Done.

Besides, Rereading, Not Reading, Is What Counts.

It Is Clear That There Is No Classification Of The Universe That Is Not Arbitrary And Full Of Conjectures. The Reason For This Is Very Simple: We Do Not Know What Kind Of Thing The Universe Is.

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.

To Think, Analyze And Invent, He [pierre Menard] Also Wrote Me, “are Not Anomalous Acts, But The Normal Respiration Of The Intelligence. To Glorify The Occasional Fulfillment Of This Function, To Treasure Ancient Thoughts Of Others, To Remember With Incredulous Amazement That The Doctor Universal Is Thought, Is To Confess Our Languor Or Barbarism. Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas, And I Believe That In The Future He Will Be." (jorge Luis Borges, "pierre Menard, Author Of Don Quixote, 1939)

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.

When One Confesses To An Act, One Ceases To Be An Actor In It And Becomes Its Witness, Becomes A Man That Observes And Narrates It And No Longer The Man That Performed It.

What Will Die With Me The Day I Die? What Pathetic Or Frail Image Will Be Lost To The World? The Voice Of Macedonio Fernandez, The Image Of A Bay Horse In A Vacant Lot On The Corner Of Sarrano And Charcas, A Bar Of Sulfur In The Drawer Of A Mahogany Desk?

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.

A Writer - And, I Believe, Generally All Persons - Must Think That Whatever Happens To Him Or Her Is A Resource. All Things Have Been Given To Us For A Purpose, And An Artist Must Feel This More Intensely. 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.

If A Writer Disbelieves What He Is Writing, Then He Can Hardly Expect His Reader To Believe It.

For Me, Beauty Is A Physical Sensation, Something We Feel With Our Whole Body. It Is Not The Result Of Judgement. We Do Not Arrive At It By Way Of Rules. We Either Feel Beauty Or We Don't.

I Know Of A Wild Region Whose Librarians Repudiate The Vain Superstitious Custom Of Seeking Any Sense In Books And Compare It To Looking For Meaning In Dreams Or In The Chaotic Lines Of One's Hands . . . They Admit That The Inventors Of Writing Imitated The Twenty-five Natural Symbols, But They Maintain That This Application Is Accidental And That Books In Themselves Mean Nothing. This Opinion - We Shall See - Is Not Altogether False.

Being An Agnostic Means All Things Are Possible, Even God, Even The Holy Trinity. This World Is So Strange That Anything May Happen, Or May Not Happen. Being An Agnostic Makes Me Live In A Larger, A More Fantastic Kind Of World, Almost Uncanny. It Makes Me More Tolerant.

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

The Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

When You Come Right Down To It, Opinions Are The Most Superficial Things About Anyone

Superficial Things

Whatever One Man Does, It Is As If All Men Did It. For That Reason, It Is Not Unfair That One Disobedience In A Garden Should Contaminate All Humanity; For That Reason It Is Not Unjust That The Crucifixion Of A Single Jew Should Be Sufficient To Save It.

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

Self Improvement

I Think It's All To The Good That A Writer Shouldn't Be Too Famous. Because, In A Country Where A Writer May Be Famous, He May Be Pandering To The Mob, Celebrity And So On.

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

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

The Worst Labyrinth Is Not That Intricate Form That Can Entrap Us Forever, But A Single And Precise Straight Line

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.

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

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

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

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

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.

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

In Fact I'm In Too Much Of A Mental Muddle To Know Where I Am - An Idealist Or Not. I'm A Mere Man Of Letters, And I Do What I Can With Those Subjects.

Being With You And Not Being With You Is The Only Way I Have To Measure Time.

So Plant Your Own Gardens And Decorate Your Own Soul, Instead Of Waiting For Someone To Bring You Flowers.

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 Earth We Inhabit Is An Error, An Incompetent Parody. Mirrors And Paternity Are Abominable Because They Multiply And Affirm It.

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.

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.

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

Time Is The Substance Of Which We Are Made

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.

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely.

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

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

Soccer Is Popular Because Stupidity Is Popular.

You Who Read Me, Are You Sure Of Understanding My Language?

Happy Are The Beloved And The Lovers And Those Who Can Live Without Love.

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

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

Poetry Springs From Something Deeper; It's Beyond Intelligence.

Captivated By Its Discipline, Humanity Forgets And Goes On Forgetting That It Is The Discipline Of Chess Players, Not Of Angels.

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

When Writers Die They Become Books, Which Is, After All, Not Too Bad An Incarnation.

The Minotaur More Than Justifies The Existence Of The Labyrinth.

The Future Is Inevitable And Precise, But It May Not Occur. God Lurks In The Gaps.

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

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.

Thus My Life Is A Flight And I Lose Everything And Everything Belongs To Oblivion, Or To Him.

If You Using Local Color In An Unobtrusive Way, It Is All For The Good. But If You Stress It, The Whole Thing Is Artificial. But It Should Be Used, I Mean, It's Not Forbidden. But You Don't Have To Stress It.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

Life And Death Have Been Lacking In My Life.

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.

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.

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.

Writing Is Nothing More Than A Guided Dream.

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

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

Unforgivable Sin

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

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.

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

There Is An Hour Of The Afternoon When The Plain Is On The Verge Of Saying Something. It Never Says, Or Perhaps It Says It Infinitely, Or Perhaps We Do Not Understand It, Or We Understand It And It Is Untranslatable As Music.

That One Individual Should Awaken In Another Memories That Belong To Still A Third Is An Obvious Paradox.

I, Who Have Been So Many Men In Vain, Want To Be One Man, Myself Alone. From Out Of A Whirlwind The Voice Of God Replied: I Am Not, Either. I Dreamed The World The Way You Dreamed Your Work, My Shakespeare: One Of The Forms Of My Dream Was You, Who, Like Me, Are Many And One.

A Book Is Not An Isolated Being: It Is A Relationship, An Axis Of Innumerable Relationships

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.

Art Is Endless Like A River Flowing, Passing, Yet Remaining.

I Saw A Sunset In Queretaro That Seemed To Reflect The Color Of A Rose In Bengal.

All Writing Is Dreaming

I Write For Myself, And Perhaps For Half A Dozen Friends. And That Should Be Enough. And That Might Improve The Quality Of My Writing. But If I Were Writing For Thousands Of People, Then I Would Write What Might Please Them. And As I Know Nothing About Them, And Maybe I'd Have A Rather Low Opinion Of Them, I Don't Think That Would Do Any Good To My Work.

Time Forks Perpetually Toward Innumerable Futures.

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.

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

I Have Known Uncertainty: A State Unknown To The Greeks.

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.

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.

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.

The Two Important Facts I Should Say, Are Emotion, And Then Words Arising From Emotion. I Don't Think You Can Write In An Emotionless Way. If You Attempt It, The Result Is Artificial. I Don't Like That Kind Of Writing. I Think That If A Poem Is Really Great, You Should Think Of It As Having Written Itself Despite The Author. It Should Flow.

It Means Much To Have Loved, To Have Been Happy, To Have Laid My Hand On The Living Garden, Even For A Day.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

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.

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

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.

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.

Creativity Is Suspended Between Memory And Forgetting.

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

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

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 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.

Time Is The Tiger That Devours Me, But I Am That Tiger.

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

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.

We Did Meet Forty Years Ago. At That Time We Were Both Influenced By Whitman And I Said, Jokingly In Part, 'i Don't Think Anything Can Be Done In Spanish, Do You?' Neruda Agreed, But We Decided It Was Too Late For Us To Write Our Verse In English. We'd Have To Make The Best Of A Second-rate Literature.

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 Had Always Thought Of Paradise / In Form And Image As A Library.

I Wonder If I Have Woven Through Dreams The Sexual Strife. I Don't Think So. But After All, My Business Is To Weave Dreams. I Suppose I May Be Allowed To Choose The Material.

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

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?

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.

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.

As A Boy, I Used To Marvel That The Letters In A Closed Book Did Not Get Scrambled And Lost Overnight.

The Machinery Of The World Is Far Too Complex For The Simplicity Of Men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Art Always Opts For The Individual, The Concrete; Art Is Not Platonic.

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.

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

Perhaps The Apparent Favor Of The Universe Is No More Than The Crocodile Grin Of A Doberman Breathing Hard And About To Be Hungry?

Only In The Present Do Things Happen.

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

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

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

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

Beyond My Anxiety, Beyond This Writing, The Universe Waits, Inexhaustible, Inviting.

There Is Nothing In The World That Is Not Mysterious, But The Mystery Is More Evident In Certain Things Than In Others: In The Sea, In The Eyes Of The Elders, In The Color Yellow, And In Music.

I Have No Personal System Of Philosophy. I Never Attempt To Do That. I Am Merely A Man Of Letters.

My Friends Tell Me That I Am An Intruder, That I Don't Really Write When I Attempt Poetry. But Those Of My Friends Who Write In Prose Say That I'm No Writer When I Attempt Prose. So Really I Don't Know What To Do, I'm In A Quandary.

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

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.

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.

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

In The Course Of A Life Devoted Less To Living Than To Reading, I Have Verified Many Times That Literary Intentions And Theories Are Nothing More Than Stimuli And That The Final Work Usually Ignores Or Even Contradicts Them.

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?

Time Broadens The Scope Of Verses And I Know Of Some Which, Like Music, Are Everything For All Men.

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

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

The European And The North American Consider That A Book That Has Been Awarded Any Kind Of Prize Must Be Good; The Argentine Allows For The Possibility That The Book Might Not Be Bad, Despite The Prize.

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

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.

Leaving Behind The Babble Of The Plaza, I Enter The Library. I Feel, Almost Physically, The Gravitation Of The Books, The Enveloping Serenity Of Order, Time Magically Dessicated And Preserved.

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

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.

The Time For Your Labor Has Been Granted.

I Can Give You My Loneliness, My Darkness, The Hunger Of My Heart, I Am Trying To Bribe You With Uncertainty, With Danger, With Defeat.

A Book Is A Physical Object In A World Of Physical Objects. It Is A Set Of Dead Symbols. And Then The Right Reader Comes Along, And The Words—or Rather The Poetry Behind The Words, For The Words Themselves Are Mere Symbols—spring To Life, And We Have A Resurrection Of The Word.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Democracy Is An Abuse Of Statistics.

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

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.

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.

Time Is The Substance From Which I Am Made. Time Is A River Which Carries Me Along, But I Am The River; It Is A Tiger That Devours Me, But I Am The Tiger; It Is A Fire That Consumes Me, But I Am The Fire.

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.

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

The Future Is As Irrevocable As An Inflexible Yesterday.

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.

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.

I Know That When I Think Of Myself As Being Utterly Worn Out, When I Think That Somehow I Have Nothing More To Write, Then Something Is Happening Within Me. And, In Due Course, It Bubbles Up; It Comes To The Surface, And Then I Do My Best To Listen. But There's Nothing Mystical About All This. I Suppose All Writers Do 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.

I Have Used The Philosophers' Ideas For My Own Private Literary Purposes, But I Don't Think That I'm A Thinker. I Suppose That My Thinking Has Been Done For Me By Berkeley, By Hume, By Schopenhauer, By Mauthner Perhaps.

I Suppose Every Poet Has His Own Private Mythology. Maybe He's Unaware Of It. People Tell Me That I Have Evolved A Private Mythology Of Tigers, Of Blades, Of Labyrinths, And I"m Unaware Of The Fact This Is So. My Readers Are Finding It All The Time. But I Think Perhaps That Is The Duty Of Poet.

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely. But If You're Writing A Story, You Have To Make It As Plausible As You Can, Because If Not, The Reader's Imagination Will Reject It.

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

Another School Declares That All Time Has Already Transpired And That Our Life Is Only The Crepuscular And No Doubt Falsified And Mutilated Memory Or Reflection Of An Irrecoverable Process.

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.

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.

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

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.

Death Is Just Infinity Closing In.

A Writer's Work Is The Product Of Laziness.

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.

Every Man Should Be Capable Of All Ideas.

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

A Book Is More Than A Verbal Structure Or Series Of Verbal Structures; It Is The Dialogue It Establishes With Its Reader And The Intonation It Imposes Upon His Voice And The Changing And Durable Images It Leaves In His Memory. A Book Is Not An Isolated Being: It Is A Relationship, An Axis Of Innumerable Relationships.

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.

Do You Want To See What Human Eyes Have Never Seen? Look At The Moon. Do You Want To Hear What Ears Have Never Heard? Listen To The Bird's Cry. Do You Want To Touch What Hands Have Never Touched? Touch The Earth. Verily I Say That God Is About To Create The World.

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

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

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

Literature Is Not Exhaustible, For The Sufficient And Simple Reason That A Single Book Is Not. A Book Is Not An Isolated Entity: It Is A Narration, An Axis Of Innumerable Narrations. 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.

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

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

Trending Author

Dennis Bergkamp

Zora Neale Hurston

Category