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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.

-Jorge Luis Borges

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You Can't Measure Time

Jorge Luis Borges

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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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

Reality Favors Symmetry.

Soccer Is Popular Because Stupidity Is Popular.

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.

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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

May Heaven Exist, Even If My Place Is Hell.

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.

Democracy Is An Abuse Of Statistics.

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.

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

Don't Talk Unless You Can Improve The Silence.

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.

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

La Duda Es Uno De Los Nombres De La Inteligencia.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

I Would Rather Like To Think Of God As Being A Kind Of Adventurer - Even As Wells Thought About Him - Or Perhaps As Something Within Us Making For Some Unknown Purpose.

Doubt Is One Of The Names Of Intelligence.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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)

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 Think Most People Are More Important Than Their Opinions.

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.

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.

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

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 Foresee That Man Will Resign Himself Each Day To New Abominations, And Soon That Only Bandits And Soldiers Will Be Left...

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.

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.

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.

In The Critics' Vocabulary, The Work 'precursor' Is Indispensable, But It Should Be Cleansed Of All Connotations Of Polemics Or Rivalry.

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.

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

The Time For Your Labor Has Been Granted.

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

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.

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

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

Kafka Had The Sense Of Guilt. I Don't Think I Have Because I Don't Believe In Free Will. Because What I Have Done Has Been Done, Well, For Me Or Through Me. But I Haven't Done It Really. But I Don't Believe In Free Will, I Can't Feel Guilty.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Time Forks Perpetually Toward Innumerable Futures.

Writing Is Only A Guided Dream.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reality Is Not Always Probable, Or Likely.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Everything Touches Everything.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

We Have Shared Out, Like Thieves, The Amazing Treasures Of Days And Nights.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

No One Is Anyone, One Single Immortal Man Is All Men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I Am God, I Am Hero, I Am Philosopher, I Am Demon And I Am World, Which Is A Tedious Way Of Saying That I Do Not Exist.

A Man Sets Himself The Task Of Portraying The World. Shortly Before He Dies He Discovers That This Patient Labyrinth Of Lines Is A Drawing Of His Own Face.

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.

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.

Creativity Is Suspended Between Memory And Forgetting.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Time, Which Despoils Castles, Enriches Verses.

As The End Approaches, There Are No Longer Any Images From Memory - There Are Only Words.

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.

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.

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

Imprecision Is Tolerable And Verisimilar In Literature, Because We Always Tend Towards It In Life.

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

Truth Never Penetrates An Unwilling Mind.

The Sea Is An Idiom I Cannot Decipher.

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.

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

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

Films Are Even Stranger, For What We Are Seeing Are Not Disguised People But Photographs Of Disguised People, And Yet We Believe Them While The Film Is Being Shown.

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

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.

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

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 Always Imagined That Paradise Will Be A Kind Of Library.

In General, Every Country Has The Language It Deserves.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Unforgivable Sin

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Canada Is So Far Away It Hardly Exists.

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

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

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

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

Superficial Things

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

All Literature, Is, Finally Autobiographical.

Only In The Present Do Things Happen.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Reality Is Partial To Symmetry And Slight Anachronisms

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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Giulio Andreotti

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