03UndatedA 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
04UndatedWhen writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnaJorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
05UndatedPersonally, 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
07UndatedOf 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
08UndatedLeaving 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
09UndatedThe 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
10UndatedMy father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
11UndatedIt must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
12UndatedThe three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I’m left alone. I’ll stop dreaming myself.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
13UndatedIt's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
15UndatedReading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
16UndatedHistorical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
17UndatedThere 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
19UndatedWe are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
21UndatedAnother 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
22UndatedEvery novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
23UndatedI suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
