Borges Reading Quotes & Sayings

But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, — Jorge Luis Borges

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts. — Jorge Luis Borges

I can't really envision a time when I'm not shooting something. — Martin Scorsese

I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else. — Jorge Luis Borges

Suggestions for further reading Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Deepak Chopra, God: A Story of Revelation; Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet; Lawrence Kushner, Kabbalah: A Love Story; C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith; Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now — Paulo Coelho

I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols. — Jorge Luis Borges

Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. — Jorge Luis Borges

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love. — Jorge Luis Borges

The taste of the apple ... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way ... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading. — Jorge Luis Borges

I think the first reading of a poem is a true one, and after that we delude ourselves into the belief that the sensation, the impression, is repeated. — Jorge Luis Borges

I love this acting stuff. — Harvey Martin

The most powerful men were those who most effectively used the power of adult competence to enforce childish agreements. — George W. S. Trow

In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them. — Jorge Luis Borges

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words - or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols - spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word. — Jorge Luis Borges

On the road, they join the bedraggled remnants of a column of exhausted Confederate soldiers evacuating burning Atlanta. Rhett makes her take note of the scene: "Take a good look, my dear. It's a historic moment. You can tell your grandchildren how you watched the Old South disappear one night." — Vivien Leigh

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination. — Jorge Luis Borges

Emerson said that a library is a magic chamber in which there are many enchanted spirits. They wake when we call them. When the book lies unopened, it is literally, geometrically, a volume, a thing among things. When we open it, when the book surrenders itself to its reader, the aesthetic event occurs. And even for the same reader the same book changes, for the change; we are the river of Heraclitus, who said that the man of yesterday is not the man of today, who will not be the man of tomorrow. We change incessantly, and each reading of a book, each rereading, each memory of that rereading, reinvents the text. The text too is the changing river of Heraclitus. — Jorge Luis Borges

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. — Alberto Manguel

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read. — Jorge Luis Borges

We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes. — Jorge Luis Borges

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] — Jorge Luis Borges

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. — Jorge Luis Borges

I believe that the phrase 'obligatory reading' is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of 'obligatory pleasure'? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. 'Obligatory happiness'! [...] If a book bores you, leave it; don't read it because it is famous, don't read it because it is modern, don't read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is 'Paradise Lost' - which is not tedious to me - or 'Don Quixote' - which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament - which I do not plan to write - I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers' reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read. — Jorge Luis Borges

The parson refused to believe the Apothecary could help, said the monster. When times were easy, the parson nearly destroyed the Apothecary, but when the going grew tough, he was willing to throw aside every belief if it would save his daughters.
"So?" Conor said. "So would anyone! So would everyone! What did you expect him to do? — Patrick Ness

If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life. — Maria Kodama

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information. — Jorge Luis Borges

A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. — Jorge Luis Borges