JORGE LUIS BORGES QUOTES II
Argentine author (1899-1986)
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially ... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Garden of Forking Paths
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
preface, The Garden of Forking Paths
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Deutsches Requiem", Labyrinths
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Brodie's Report
What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Form of the Sword", Ficciones
What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Dreamtigers
Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Divine Comedy"
It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Evaristo Carriego
That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Evaristo Carriego
Really, nobody knows whether the world is realistic or fantastic, that is to say, whether the world is a natural process or whether it is a kind of dream, a dream that we may or may not share with others.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
Intelligence has little to do with poetry. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence. It may not even be linked with wisdom. It's a thing of its own; it has a nature of its own. Undefinable.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"A History of Eternity"
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"The Garden of Forking Paths"
The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Dreamtigers
The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don't think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Paris Review, winter-spring 1967
There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth"
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment -- the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz"
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
attributed, Borges Verbal
The unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
The Modesty of History