Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Buenos Aires] No nos une el amor sino el espanto. Será por eso que la quiero tanto

A mí se me hace cuento que empezó Buenos Aires: La juzgo tan eterna como el agua y como el aire.

it is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher

When people write in favor or against anybody, that hardly helps or hurts them...man can be done or undone by his own writing, not by what other people say of him.

Things duplicate themselves in Tlön; they also tend to grow vague or 'sketchy,' and to lose detail when they begin to be forgotten. The classic example is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar frequented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.' - Jorge Luis Borges, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

Whoever has seen the universe, whoever has beheld the fiery designs of the universe, cannot think in terms of one man, of that man's trivial fortunes or misfortunes, though he be that very man. That man has been he and now matters no more to him. What is the life of that other to him, the nation of that other to him, if he, now, is no one? This is why I do not pronounce the formula, why, lying here in the darkness, I let the days obliterate me.

Distance and antiquity (the emphases of space and time) pull on our hearts. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two thousand five hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made verses, were spectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words something of their ponderous, fleeting life, words that fulfill a long destiny?

Words are symbols that assume a shared memory. The memory I now want to set down is mine alone; all those who share it have died. The mystics invoke a rose, a kiss, a bird that is all birds, a sun that is all the stars and the sun, a jug of wine, a garden, or the sexual act. Of these metaphors, none will serve me for that long, joyous night, which left us, tired out and happy, at the borders of dawn.

The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

I reflected that there is nothing less material than money, since any coin whatsoever (let us say a coin worth twenty centavos) is, strictly speaking, a repertory of possible futures.

As fate would have it, we talked about literature; I fear I said no more than the things I usually say to journalists. My alter ego believed in the invention, or discovery, of new metaphors; I, in those metaphors that correspond to intimate and obvious affinities and that our imagination has already accepted. Old age and sunset, dreams and life, the flow of time and water. …

Lo que decimos pocas veces se parece a nosotros.

Tasalanma, yavaÅŸ yavaÅŸ artan körlük pek trajik deÄŸil. A??r bir yaz akÅŸam? gibi.

In spite of these three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary _Quixote_ is more subtle than Cervantes'.

En vano me repetí que un hombre acosado por un acto de cobardía es más complejo y más interesante que un hombre meramente animoso.

Sólo persisten en el tiempo las cosas que no fueron del tiempo.

There is a saying that only the man who has already committed a crime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erroneous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it.

Solitude weighs me down. Company does too.

La soledad me pesa. La compañía también.

Maneco Uriarte no mató a Duncan; las armas, no los hombres, pelearon. Habían dormido, lado a lado, en una vitrina, hasta que las manos las despertaron.

I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.

Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one; in London he found the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who on a stage plays at being another before a gathering of people who play at taking him for that other person.

Misery requires paradises lost