J L Borges Quotes & Sayings

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. — Jorge Luis Borges

Life itself is a quotation. — Jorge Luis Borges

People speak generally of a plain style and an elaborate style. I think this is wrong, because what is important ... is that poetry should be living ... — Jorge Luis Borges

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists. — Jorge Luis Borges

Misery requires paradises lost — Jorge Luis Borges

One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book. — Peter Greenaway

I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any. — Jorge Luis Borges

A writer's work is the product of laziness. — Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them. — Jorge Luis Borges

Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice. — Padgett Powell

In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word? — Jorge Luis Borges

I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies. — Jorge Luis Borges

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. — 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

Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today's newspaper. — Jorge Luis Borges

On those remote pages [of 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia'] it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f ) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance. — Jorge Luis Borges

Image is sorcery. — Jorge Luis Borges

I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also. — Jorge Luis Borges

The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past. — Jorge Luis Borges

It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death . — Jorge Luis Borges

Azevedo Bandeira is an expert in the art of progressive intimidation, in the satanic maneuver of gradually humiliating his interlocutor by combining verities and gibes. — Jorge Luis Borges

Cervantes told me history is the mother of truth.
Borges told me historical truth is not what took place; it is what we think took place.
So Billy Shakespeare was queer.
Ronnie was the greatest president in history, right up there on Mount Rushmore.
AIDS is mankind's greatest plague.
Israel only kills terrorists.
America never bombed Lebanon.
Jesus was straight. Juda and he were just friends.
Roseanne's parents molested her as an infant.
Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat deserved their Nobels.
And Gaetan Dugas started the AIDS epidemic. — Rabih Alameddine

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. — 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

The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing. — Jorge Luis Borges

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It's the astonishment of being myself — Jorge Luis Borges

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction. — Jorge Luis Borges

What a writer wants to do is not what he does. — Jorge Luis Borges

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges's story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
It's possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms. — Georges Perec

In this night too, in this night of his mortal eyes into which he was now descending, love and danger were again waiting ...
a murmur of glory and hexameters, of men defending a temple the gods will not save, and of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle;
the murmor of the Odysseys and Iliads it was his destiny to sing and leave echoing concavely in the memory of man.
These things we know, but not those he felt descending into the last shade of all. — Jorge Luis Borges