Jorge Luis Borges Quotes - Page 5

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.

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.

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive

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.

It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

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.

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.

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.

Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.

All literature, is, finally autobiographical.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

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.

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

Time is the substance of which we are made

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.

Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.

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 minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.