Quotes About Perspective

I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.

If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his readers to believe it.

I clarified that I myself was Colombian. What is 'being Colombian'? I'm not sure, I replied. It's an act of faith. Like being Norwegian, she said, nodding. I can recall nothing further of what was said that night.

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.

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

Además, confesar un hecho es dejar de ser el actor para ser el testigo, para ser alguien que lo mira y lo narra y que ya no lo ejecutó.

Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet?... these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.

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

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?

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.

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

Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don't know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now... And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.

And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past.

The years pass and I've told this story so many times I no longer know whether I remember it as it was or whether it's only my words I'm remembering.

I still hold two images of the ranch – the one I brought with me and the one my eyes finally saw.

My story will be true to reality or, in any case, to my personal memory of reality, which amounts to the same thing.

Por el amor, que nos deja ver a los otros como los ve la divinidad.

I'm sorry to say that people have written fifty or sixty books about me. I haven't read a single one of them, since I know too much of the subject, and I'm sick and tired of it.

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven—but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.

It only takes two facing mirrors to construct a labyrinth. from "Nightmares

The curious thing about The Ring and the Book, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in what they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word "murderer" is too general. We know this from reading other books.

Tlön será un laberinto, pero es un laberinto urdido por hombres, un laberinto destinado a que lo descifren los hombres.

If the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

non si può misurare il tempo in giorni come si misura il denaro in centesimi o in pesos, perché i pesos sono tutti uguali mentre ogni giorno è diverso e forse anche ogni ora.