Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Filosóficamente, la memoria no es menos prodigiosa que la adivinación del futuro; el día de mañana está más cerca de nosotros que la travesía del Mar Rojo por los hebreos, que, sin embargo, recordamos.

Kar??l??? baÅŸka bir yerde bulunmayan hiçbir ÅŸey yoktur.

In the earliest times, which were so susceptible to vague speculation and the inevitable ordering of the universe, there can have existed no division between the poetic and the prosaic. Everything must have been tinged with magic. Thor was not the god of thunder; he was the thunder and the god.

Ogni linguaggio è un alfabeto di simboli il cui uso presuppone un passato che gli interlocutori condividono; come trasmettere agli altri l'infinito Aleph, che la mia timorosa memoria a stento abbraccia?

I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow - the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.

La derrota tiene una dignidad que la ruidosa victoria no merece

Yo he escrito también algunos cuentos en los cuales traté ambiciosa e inultimente de ser Kafka

A volte penso che i buoni lettori siano cigni ancor più tenebrosi e rari dei buoni autori.

Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men — those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.

el vago rosa trémulo que se ve con los ojos cerrados

Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

What is past is what is real.

En Alejandría se ha dicho que sólo es incapaz de una culpa quien ya la cometió y ya se arrepintió; para estar libre de un error, agreguemos, conviene haberlo profesado

El ejercicio de las letras es misterioso; lo que opinamos es efímero y opto por la tesis platónica de la Musa y no por la de Poe, que razonó, o fingió razonar, que la escritura de un poema es una operación de la inteligencia.

I tada, kao i danas, svet beše surov; samo su ga sr?ani mogli proputovati, ali i bednici, koji se na sve priviknu.

Existe ese Aleph en lo íntimo de una piedra? ¿Lo he visto cuando vi todas las cosas y lo he olvidado? Nuestra mente es porosa para el olvido; yo mismo estoy falseando y perdiendo, bajo la trágica erosión de los años, los rasgos de Beatriz

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists.

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting... a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle; the murmor of the Odyssey s and Iliad s it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man. These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all.

But I will relate what happened with absolute honesty; that, perhaps, will help me understand it. After all, 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.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

Out of this city marched armies that seemed to be great, and afterwards were when glory had magnified them. As the years went by, an occasional soldier returned, and with a foreign trace to his speech, told tales of what had happened to him in places called Ituzaingo or Ayacucho. These things, now, are as if they had never been. --Martin Fierro

The magnetized mountain and the genie who swore to kill his benefactor are—who would deny it?—marvelous, but not so much more than the morning itself and the mere fact of being.

Afterglow Sunset is always disturbing whether theatrical or muted, but still more disturbing is that last desperate glow that turns the plain to rust when on the horizon nothing is left of the pomp and clamor of the setting sun. How hard holding on to that light, so tautly drawn and different, that hallucination which the human fear of the dark imposes on space and which ceases at once the moment we realize its falsity, the way a dream is broken the moment the sleeper knows he is dreaming.