Adolfo Bioy Casares Quotes & Sayings

I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

The habits of our lives makes us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

I dreaded an invasion of ghosts or, less likely, an invasion of the police. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares,- to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existenceof a ghost). — Adolfo Bioy Casares

The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

jimi & and me — Adolfo Bioy Casares

I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

Spontaneity is the mother of crudity. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

The influence of the future on the past, said Morel enthusiastically, almost inaudibly. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior. The right combination of circumstances had enabled me to observe them. One seldom has the chance to be a clandestine witness of several talks between the same people. But scenes are repeated in life, just as they are in the theatre. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures ... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

The sea is endless when you are in a rowboat. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

Life has now taught me that love for things, like all unrequited love, takes its toll in the long run. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone.
Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed ... — Adolfo Bioy Casares

Under the bludgeonings of fate
My head is bloody, but unbowed. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

...when one is alone it is impossible to be dead. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

... to his efforts to perpetuate man: but he has preserved nothing but sensations; and, although his invention was incomplete, he at least foreshadowed the truth: man will one day create human life. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

People love nobody as much as they do their hatred. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection. — Adolfo Bioy Casares

His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive. — Adolfo Bioy Casares