Quotes from Jorge Luís Borges

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

On February 14, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires urging me to return home immediately; my father was not at all well. God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the absoluteness of the adverbial phrase, the temptation to dramatize my grief by feigning a virile stoicism-all this perhaps distracted me from any possibility of real pain.

That imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced, is perhaps the aesthetic reality.

The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

There is a river whose waters give immortality; somewhere there must be another river whose waters take it away. The number of rivers is not infinite; an immortal traveler wandering the world will someday have drunk from them all.

The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.

In an isolated region from Iran there is this wall tower, windowless, doorless, not very tall. In its only room with arched walls and the stamped earth as its floor, there's a wooden table and a bench. In this round cell a man that looks like me is writing in signs that i don't understand a long poem about a man who in another round cell is writing a poem about a man in another round cell. Endless series; nobody will ever read what prisoners write.

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete.

Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past. Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after.

Mirrors in metal, and the masked Mirror of mahogany that in its mist Of a red twilight hazes The face that is gazed on as it gazes

I cannot combine some characters dhcmrlchtdj which 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.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

Hay que tener cuidado al elegir a los enemigos porque uno termina pareciéndose a ellos.

I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.

In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.

It is generally understood that a modern-day book may honorably be based upon an older one, especially since, as Dr. Johnson observed, no man likes owing anything to his contemporaries. The repeated but irrelevant points of congruence between Joyce's Ulysses and Homer's Odyssey continue to attract (though I shall never understand why) the dazzled admiration of critics.

Desvarío laborioso y empobrecedor el de componer vastos libros; el de explayar en quinientas páginas una idea cuya perfecta exposición oral cabe en pocos minutos. Mejor procedimiento es simular que esos libros ya existen y ofrecer un resumen, un comentario.

The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors.

All things left her, all But one. Her highborn courtliness Accompanied her to the end, Beyond the rapture and its eclipse, In a way like an angel's. Of Elvira The first thing that I saw - such years ago - Was her smile and also it was the last.