Borges Aleph Quotes & Sayings

In every era there comes a moment when the collective thoughts, whims, and motivations of a people become so self-absorbed, so malignant, so unheeding that nature itself revolts. Man scars the land such that it finally rebels against him. As thoughts can spread despair and death like seedlings of weeds strewn by the wind, so they eventually draw the Gardener to pluck them out. The vetches must be pulled, roots and all. When this happens, the Medium ceases to bless, and instead, it curses. Instead of healing, it spews poison. It happens swiftly and terribly. The ancients gave it a name, this culling process that blackens the world. They named it after a wasting disease that occurs in once-healthy groves of trees. They called it the Blight. — Jeff Wheeler

Nobody loves you the way they do when you're dying. — Charles Graeber

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit. — Neil Gaiman

As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight. — Jose Luis Borges

33"Do you know the ordinances of the heavens, Or fix their rule over the earth? — Anonymous

Then I'm going to pray that God sends a conundrum your way that you must solve and that you can only solve with His help."
Miranda straightened. "That's not very chivalrous."
His eyes were kind but firm. "I admire the woman I've come to know here, and while I can't promise I'll ever see her again, I refuse to let her disappear off the face of the earth. You have to keep her alive. — Regina Jennings

As Borges himself showed us in so many stories - "The Aleph", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Gift", "Blue Tigers", "Shakespeare's Memory" - a blessing is always a mixed blessing.
As Borges noted sadly, he inherited a library, and blindness; we who study Borges inherit great sight, yet the rest of the library somehow fades.

(pg 303, "What I Lost When I Translated Jorge Luis Borges") — Andrew Hurley

This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet? — Georges Perec

Man's chief moral deficiency appears to be not his indiscretions but his reticence. — Hannah Arendt

I love paint. I like watercolours. I like acrylic paint ... a little bit. I like house paint. I like oil-based paint, and I love oil paint. I love the smell of turpentine and I like that world of oil paint very, very, very much. — David Lynch

I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of goo. — Alan W. Watts

You want to get Capone? Here's how you get him: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. It's the Chicago way and that's how you get Capone. — David Mamet

There is a great deal of advertising that is much better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. — Jerry Della Femina