01UndatedWe are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
02UndatedA circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
03UndatedFerrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we are our past, aren’t we? Our past is not what can be recorded in a biography or in the newspapers. Our past is our memory. That memory can be hidden or inaccurate—it doesn’t matter. It’s there, isn’t it? It can be a lie but that lie becomes part of our memory, part of us. (Conversations, Vol. 1)Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
04UndatedWe 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.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
06UndatedI have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
08UndatedI owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
10UndatedLost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
11UndatedIt seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
12UndatedGod, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life....upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
13UndatedThe library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
14UndatedThere is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
15UndatedI cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
16UndatedTo think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
17UndatedThings, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, 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?Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
18UndatedThe universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
19UndatedThe Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
20UndatedSo my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
21UndatedIf we think of the novel and the epic...The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
22UndatedI believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
23UndatedThere are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
24UndatedHeaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.Jorge Luis Borges / quote ↗
