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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.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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This Felicitous Supposition Declared

Jorge Luis Borges

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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.

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

Reality Favors Symmetry.

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.

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.

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

When I Feel I'm Going To Write Something, Then I Just Am Quiet And I Try To Listen. Then Something Comes Through. And I Do What I Can In Order Not To Tamper With It.

You Can't Measure Time By Days, The Way You Measure Money By Dollars And Cents, Because Dollars Are All The Same While Every Day Is Different And Maybe Every Hour As Well.

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.

Let Others Pride Themselves About How Many Pages They Have Written; I'd Rather Boast About The Ones I've Read.

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

Only In The Present Do Things Happen.

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

I Confess That I Have Not Cleared A Path Through All Seven Hundred Pages, I Confess To Having Examined Only Bits And Pieces, And Yet I Know What It Is, With That Bold And Legitimate Certainty With Which We Assert Our Knowledge Of A City, Without Ever Having Been Rewarded With The Intimacy Of All The Many Streets It Includes.

Don't Talk Unless You Can Improve The Silence.

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.

There Is No Intellectual Exercise Which Is Not Ultimately Useless.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Each Thing Implies The Universe.

Fame Is A Form, Perhaps The Worst Form, Of Incomprehension.

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.

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

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

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?

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

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

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?

I Am Attracted To Fantastic Writing, And Fantastic Reading, Of Course. But I Think Things That We Call Fantastic May Be Real, In The Sense Of Being Real Symbols.

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

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.

I Don't Think Esthetic Schools Are Important. What Is Important Is The Use That Is Made Of Them, Or Whatever The Individual Writer Does.

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

The Falklands Thing Was A Fight Between Two Bald Men Over A Comb.

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.

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.

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

Life And Death Have Been Lacking In My Life.

I Thought That A Man Can Be An Enemy Of Other Men, Of The Moments Of Other Men, But Not Of A Country: Not Of Fireflies, Words, Gardens, Streams Of Water, Sunsets.

If I Write A Fantastic Story, I'm Not Writing Something Willful. On The Contrary, I Am Writing Something That Stands For My Feelings, Or For My Thoughts. So That, In A Sense, A Fantastic Story Is As Real And Perhaps More Real Than A Mere Circumstantial Story. Because After All, Circumstances Come And Go, And Symbols Remain.

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

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.

The Web Of Time - The Strands Of Which Approach One Another, Bifurcate, Intersect, Or Ignore Each Other Through The Centuries - Embraces "every" Possibility. We Do Not Exist In Most Of Them. In Some You Exist And Not I, While In Others I Do, And You Do Not, And In Yet Others Both Of Us Exist.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

This Web Of Time--the Strands Of Which Approach One Another, Bifurcate, Intersect Or Ignore Eachother Through The Centuries--embrace Every Posibility.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A Labyrinth Of Symbols... An Invisible Labyrinth Of Time.

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?

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.

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

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

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

I Hardly Know What I'm Going To Write - An Article, A Story, A Poem In Free Verse - Or In Some Regular Form. I Only Know That When I Have The First Sentence. And When The First Sentence Makes A Kind Of Pattern, Then I Find Out The Kind Of Rhythm I'm Looking For.

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

Canada Is So Far Away It Hardly Exists.

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

Censorship Is The Mother Of Metaphor.

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

Soccer Is Popular Because Stupidity Is Popular.

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

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

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

Of All Man’s Instruments, The Most Wondrous, No Doubt, Is The Book. The Other Instruments Are Extensions Of His Body. The Microscope, The Telescope, Are Extensions Of His Sight; The Telephone Is The Extension Of His Voice; Then We Have The Plow And The Sword, Extensions Of The Arm. But The Book Is Something Else Altogether: The Book Is An Extension Of Memory And Imagination.

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

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?

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

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 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 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.

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

The Heresies We Should Fear Are Those Which Can Be Confused With Orthodoxy.

The Future Is As Irrevocable As An Inflexible Yesterday.

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

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

Writing Is Nothing More Than A Guided Dream.

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.

My Undertaking Is Not Difficult, Essentially. I Should Only Have To Be Immortal To Carry It Out.

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.

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

Time Management

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

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.

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.

I Think That The Reader Should Enrich What He Is Reading. He Should Misunderstand The Text; He Should Change It Into Something Else.

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

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.

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

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)

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

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

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.

Any Life, However Long And Complicated It May Be, Actually Consists Of A Single Moment — The Moment When A Man Knows Forever More Who He Is.

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.

A Writer Should Have Another Lifetime To See If He's Appreciated.

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

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

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

A Writer's Work Is The Product Of Laziness.

The Central Problem Of Novel-writing Is Causality.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

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

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

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.

The Sea Is An Idiom I Cannot Decipher.

Any Time Something Is Written Against Me, I Not Only Share The Sentiment But Feel I Could Do The Job Far Better Myself. Perhaps I Should Advise Would-be Enemies To Send Me Their Grievances Beforehand, With Full Assurance That They Will Receive My Every Aid And Support. I Have Even Secretly Longed To Write, Under A Pen Name, A Merciless Tirade Against Myself.

I Have Preferred To Teach My Students Not English Literature But My Love For Certain Authors, Or, Even Better, Certain Pages, Or Even Better Than That, Certain Lines. One Falls In Love With A Line, Then With A Page, Then With An Author. Well, Why Not? It Is A Beautiful Process.

Falling In Love

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.

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

I Think Of Myself As Being An Ethical Man, But I Don't Try To Teach Ethics. I Have No Message. I Know Little About Contemporary Life. I Don't Read A Newspaper. I Dislike Politics And Politicians. I Belong To No Party Whatever. My Private Life Is A Private Life. I Try To Avoid Photography And Publicity.

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

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.

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.

Everything Touches Everything.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Great American Writer Herman Melville Says Somewhere In The White Whale That A Man Ought To Be 'a Patriot To Heaven,' And I Believe It Is A Good Thing, This Ambition To Be A Cosmopolitan, This Idea To Be Citizens Not Of A Small Parcel Of The World That Changes According To The Currents Of Politics, According To The Wars, To What Occurs, But To Feel That The Whole World Is Our Country.

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

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

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

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

When You Reach My Age, You Realize You Couldn't Have Done Things Very Much Better Or Much Worse Than You Did Them In The First Place.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Two Aesthetics Exist: The Passive Aesthetic Of Mirrors And The Active Aesthetic Of Prisms. Guided By The Former, Art Turns Into A Copy Of The Environment's Objectivity Or The Individual's Psychic History. Guided By The Latter, Art Is Redeemed, Makes The World Into Its Instrument, And Forges, Beyond Spatial And Temporal Prisons, A Personal Vision.

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

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.

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

Life Itself Is A Quotation.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Unforgivable Sin

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

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

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.

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 Suppose Identity Depends On Memory. And If My Memory Is Blotted Out, Then I Wonder If I Exist - I Mean, If I Am The Same Person. Of Course, I Don't Have To Solve That Problem. It's Up To God, If Any.

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

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.

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

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

I Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

I Thought Of A Labyrinth Of Labyrinths, Of One Sinuous Spreading Labyrinth That Would Encompass The Past And The Future . . . I Felt Myself To Be, For An Unknown Period Of Time, An Abstract Perceiver Of The World.

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Harold W. Dodds

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