Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

Siempre imaginé que el Paraíso sería algún tipo de biblioteca.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." [As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges , The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town , The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

Personally, 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.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

Life itself is a quotation.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

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.

Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.

What a writer wants to do is not what he does.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within