At the Edge of Faery and Earth

At the Edge of Faery and Earth

 

Many beautiful women, many different colors

Eyes, skin, hair, souls, auras, spirits, souls — All unique

All I love, in some way or another — More or less

Yet united by a common goal of making the world

 

Creating a better society and environment for the future

Sometimes I think I do not deserve to be in their company

I mostly just fight monsters — They create life and order

In chaos, magic in the midst of stagnation, balance

 

Time passes, generations of human families, on the borderlands

Between the higher and middle words, Earth and Faery

 

Gaia walks with me and tells me of her past lives

As we try our best to positively influence the course

Of history on Earth and in the material universe beyond

 

There are always dark forces that are jealous and resentful

Ignorant or sorrowful — Both inside us and in the worlds outside

Yet there is always hope for redemption in the conflict between

Good and evil — The sides are not always clearly defined

 

And there are always more than two sides between chaos and order

Left and right, male and female, light and darkness, all combined

The Tree of Life and Consciousness uniting the worlds above and below

The play of the cosmos, setting and living landscape, Eldren

In the in-between world, anything is possible — Here, home, and even beyond

From Childhood to Adulthood

From Childhood to Adulthood

Psychic powers — Boys and girls floating in air

Not just in dreams, but in the material world, sometimes

Levitation — Moving objects with one’s mind — Force

Of will — Influencing others’ thoughts and emotions

Their parents also have this gift, but they choose not

To practice it — Which causes anger and resentment

But over time both the parents and the children compromise

The play of life continues onwards, and the new overtakes the old

While retaining the best of the old order — Patterns of eternity

Dance of Life

Dance of Life

Sometimes it is hard to know

Who to follow, who to oppose

Which side of a conflict is correct

Most right, or at least less wrong

Each has another side, and another after that one

In the relatively distant future

Things are even more difficult

To understand how to choose

What is right, missing a hundred years

Context — Progress of history, change

Of ideas and ideologies, factions and organizations

Of power and authority — Leaving aside questions

Of how I am where I am now, at this time

More importantly, when I am — This new world

Offers almost undreamed of possibilities

Yet unknown dangers as well, but I cannot say

I regret waking up here and now, though I do miss

The people I left behind — As far as I can tell they are gone

But perhaps there is a way for me to see them again

If I can find out how I came to be here and now

One hundred years distant from everyone I once loved

Organizations of darkness, banal evil in service to horrible goals

And ideals — Extra-dimensional creatures without compassion or ethics

Or at least from a human perspective, except in the peculiar culture

Of the darkness beyond — Our Universe of Light and Darkness

Mingle together — Forms of life completely alien to us

Except perhaps in some of our nightmares, hells — Giant insects

Communities of organization without joy or art or love

At least from our perspective — Some form of love exists there no doubt

And the swirling chaos of apparently infinite darkness, with only a little

Light — And there are some figures of light and wisdom that have dealings

With the dark powers, for their own inscrutable goals, reasons beyond

Our understanding, for now — Out of darkness comes the light

Yet within the darkness continues in its almost infinite varieties

Forms of diversity — Doorways exist between our two worlds

Universes — Guarded by agents of order and chaos, light and darkness

Sometimes close to doorways between the higher realms of pure consciousness

And our Universe — Life and love have transcended all material barriers

Deep darkness of the void beyond our dimension of mixed light and darkness

Combines in the Dance of Life with Light, the five worlds of Eternal Love

The darkness frightens us and yet exhilarates us, providing a source

And destination for all that we do not like about ourselves, others

Our world and cosmos working out the complexity and simplicity of life

In the Universe we call home, in the perhaps infinite expanse of space

Material World — Where beauty in the spiral and circle of time plays out

Evolution Growth Change

Evolution Growth Change

 

Looking back at my past life

Mistakes that seemed unforgivable

Crises that threatened to destroy everything

Or so I thought — My place in the world

And Universe — Now seem small and inconsequential

In retrospect — Except in how they shaped my evolution

And development as a human being

Small and large — Sometimes in ways that I only now

Understand and only partially grasp

 

I can’t blame anyone else but myself

Yet I can explain by describing how others

Might have been wrong, at least in regards

To what would be best for me — Yet who can say

How even the smallest changes in one life

Might positively or negatively affect the future

Present, now — A trillion trillion combinations

Of moments and choices over the course of human

History — And my own — Even if I have only lived

Once, my soul — There is almost an infinity of alternatives

Parallel courses of history, all existing simultaneously

Until the present moment — And choice — Love and life

Time — In my own life and the life of the world — Universe

 

Who can tell if I am not in fact better for all my mistakes

My parents, grandparents, ancestors from all over the world

The ambiguity and uncertainty in my own life and mind today, tonight

Might not be such a terrible thing after all — As long as it does not

Cripple, the door to the void open too much, more than just a crack

Some evolution along with the involution, meeting in the present moment

Future present for every living being sharing the world of possibilities

Growth and change, spiral life, and the arrow and circle of time

The maps in my head can be useful but discovery and exploration

Landscape of my mind and environment, greater and more wondrous

Than even my dreams — The maps help me when I get lost

Sometimes even helping me find the right path, or at least realize

I was on the wrong one in the past, and I can choose a different one

Perhaps even one from a long time ago, in the future past

That is yet new to me now — As long as I am moving forward

With an open heart and mind, in balance with my true self and the cosmos

Nature, love — The forces of order, chaos, and balance between the two

The Universe of Universes and the world we all inhabit, one of many

I am content and maybe even happy, for now — I must train myself

To be alright with the uncertainty and productive chaos of the world

That can be a blessing and not just a curse — As long as I keep

Trying to find some kind of order here, there — Truth within

Myself, if I have the right keys to understanding the all in all

The world and my place in it — Life continues ever onwards

 

As long as life continues on — And we learn from our mistakes

Become better stewards of the Earth and Air and Water — Soul

Of nature, fire of spirit — Humanity — We are only at the beginning

Of our history as a species, only limited by our imagination as a species

Imaginations or lack thereof — Our petty rivalries, ancient quarrels

Among groups of people, desire for power over others, outdated ideas

Ideologies of rigid control or complete freedom without consequences

No order at all — Out of balance with ourselves and nature

Yet we are learning — The old ways that no longer work fade away

With time and evolution of the human mind and spirit towards the source

Giving consciousness, room to new ways of organizing life and spirit

Some so old that they are completely foreign to us, some completely new

Ancient and future paradigms that can allow us to live in harmony

With ourselves and the Universe as one entity experiencing itself, ourself

Becoming aware of all aspects of existence and reality — Life and love

No greed or lust for power over one another and the planet

Belonging to the land, water, air, and sky, more than the other way around

 

Using our intelligence and wisdom to perform a sacred duty of helping

Life to flourish in ever more diverse and beautiful forms on Earth

And when we are ready, planets beyond our own solar system

Stars and galaxies far out in the infinite darkness, blue and white

Calling to us and keeping us company at night — Giving our sun a break

Dimensions and worlds within the deepest parts of our souls, of stars

And in the vast emptiness of space and time, yet almost bursting with light

Meaning and light even in the deepest darkness, the spark of life

Uniting and bringing together disparate individual souls

Throughout the Cosmic Ocean — Binding and bridging our Universe

With each part of itself, realities beyond this physical realm

Dimension, parallel universe — Doorways of consciousness

We can access with the right keys, and the knowledge of where they are

Awareness of the multiple forms of life, light, love everywhere

Inside us and outside our souls, all around us — Beyond

There is always more to discover and explore, always more

Beyond and within our own mind, body, and spirit — Our souls

Connected to the universal cosmic consciousness and awareness

Sailing Through Time on a Cosmic Ocean of Eternal Love

Sailing Through Time on a Cosmic Ocean of Eternal Love

 

Time travel, inhabiting my future self

Learning about alien species visiting Earth

Changing history by following along with myself

Leaving clues and signs for me to find later, earlier

Creating a small army of freedom fighters

Anarchists, socialists, communists united by vision

Of a world free from hunger, injustice, oppression

Taking the best of what the aliens have to offer for humanity

Replacing the old order and hierarchies of power

In the shared goal of making humanity a galactic citizen

Universal belonging, working for peace, justice, stability

And innovation — A bright future of light, life, love for all

Here, and beyond in the vast emptiness of space, other worlds

Transforming humanity’s basest instincts into higher callings

Dedication to truth, perfection, understanding of complexity

Instead of war, violent conflict, extreme competition beyond play

Shared resources, knowledge, wisdom — An Utopia — Life without fear

Problems we take for granted now, in the past, before

The Others come, who are yet to come, yet always here

Bringing new knowledge and wisdom that is yet old

Kept safe by elders of ancient cultures, carried on by future generations

Waiting for the day when they could share with all

Humanity suddenly confronted with the reality

That we are not ever truly alone in the Universe

For better or worse, and there are new, better ways of doing things

Organizing ourselves not only to survive

But thrive, and become full members of the community

Of the Universe of Universes — All times and places linked

By the knowledge and wisdom of the Elder Races

Guides and sometimes exploiters of the younger ones

Humanity — We must evolve and transform ourselves

Into something greater and more beautiful than we can imagine

Undreamed of, except by a few — The ones with love and peace

In their hearts and minds, those who are the storytellers

Artists, poets, philosophers — Leaders of thought and feeling

Those of gentle soul and also fierce passion for change and progress

Changes

Changes

Looking out my window at the treeline, from past to future

What once was diminished by imbalance and progress

Now lives free and true, a century of uninhibited growth

And flowering — All of the people I loved are gone

Taken by time and circumstance and the promise

Of a better life far away, in the Mega Cities and even beyond Earth

The mistakes of the 20th century have been fixed

Balance between humanity and nature has been restored

My home is a paradise on Earth, and most every change has been good

Yet I can’t help but wish that I could see some of my old friends

Earth Family — Soul mates, especially the ones I dream about

The World of the Future

The World of the Future

 

Advanced technology and more wisdom to go with

The ever changing human spirit, that yet remains

The same essential nature, better than it used to be

Better than things once were overall — The Hero

And Heroine — Come into the world to save us all

Yet we are all heroes, literally and figuratively

 

I awake and it is the future — One hundred years have passed

While I slept — Now I am in a world I barely recognize

Though the landscape remains essentially unchanged

Everything else is different: people, buildings, transportation

Not just in the Mega Cities, but also where I live at the edge

Of the misty mountains and its temperate rainforest

What once was a national park and is now a global one

Still the most diverse collection of communities of life

In the world — An ecosystem held in trust for the future

Generations to come, that have already come, for me

A traveler from the distant past unaware of how I came to be

Here now in the 22nd century of the common era

 

And outside the global park, as well as inside the borders

Free, plentiful, and clean energy available for everyone

The Sun, Wind, Earth, Water, and Cosmic forces of Sky

Harnessed for the benefit of all, with no cost or restriction

For those who use energy for heating, traveling, growing food

Essentially a paradise compared to the past, yet with some problems

Even in Utopia — But no hunger, poverty, or institutional injustice

A global government with local control through democratic means

And different styles of living in the hundreds of Mega Cities

Spread out over Planet Earth, unique yet unified by common interest

Peace and stability, order within the chaos of life and ever-increasing

Knowledge and wisdom about life, the universe, and the cosmos beyond

 

And in our space-time ship that I am lucky enough to have access to

Our first priority is to our home planet, and the stars and planets in our galaxy

And the stars and planets in galaxies beyond our own

Home — In all dimensions, universes, worlds connected

Parallel, alternate, pocket within and yet outside

The physical universe we call home

Even though I can go back to the world I once knew

The time of great transition at the beginning of the 21st century

I am not ready yet — There are so many beautiful and amazing things

Left to see, learn, and do in this new world of the future, yet now present

Between Earth and the Universe of Magic

Between Earth and the Universe of Magic

 

Castle at the edge of Sky — A gateway

To a world with castles floating in Sky

Faery, magical possibility and source

For many strange and wondrous things on Earth

 

And people of the moon and stars

Sharing our Sun, yet in a different dimension

Parallel universe — Connecting to many versions

Of Earth, alternate timelines — Infinite possibilities

 

Peace, Love, and Understanding — Ideals for an optimal real time future

A world that we all share without poverty, hunger, or injustice

An example for the Earth and the World of Faery

Balance and peace in both realms, dimensions bridged by the centers of power

 

Half influenced by Earth, and half by the magical land beyond yet near

The sources of material nature and magic, and the human world’s mythologies

Leaving My Past

Leaving My Past

 

We part as friends, at least not enemies

The crimes I committed to make her happy

Have made us both rich, yet in hiding

From bad people, who do not want me to leave

The life I have lived, my role as a thief

And all-around criminal — No matter how

I justified what I did, I know it was wrong

So now I am trying to make up for lost time

I give Helen half of what I have hidden away

The rest to my family and friends — Atonement

 

She keeps the other treasures I gave her, but I can always

Find more — The quest and journey are half of the prize

Medicine that can heal the world and restore balance

The Message, or one of many — All times and yet only one

Mythic Dreamtime — The ever expansive present moment

 

Echoes of the past and future, all happening now, then

The churning of the cosmic ocean, the ordering of the universe

The birth of stars, our star, planet Earth, the moon

All these things in the stories of our world’s mythologies

Retelling them, we recreate those holy moments, the one moment

Our perspective and perception includes that of the outside looking in

Our beautiful and expanding physical universe of billions of stars

Organized in patterns of eternity — Spirals, circles, fractals

Holographic mandalas within mandalas — Worlds within worlds

Universes of light and darkness, connected yet separate from our own

 

The cosmic ocean of all life, containing all possibilities and universes

Hierarchy of organization bringing order out of chaos and back again

The cosmic drama of eternal conflict, yet also resolution of opposites

The mythic time of coming together between left and right — The Lovers

Only once yet again and again, the eternal moment of initiation

Into the mysteries of the universe and worlds of light and darkness

Beyond our own world — The beauty of nature everywhere, yet nowhere

As sweet as home, wherever we feel our heart to be — Here or there

Planet Earth — A global community of races, species, philosophies

We must work together in a natural way — The way the ancients have left

The many ways that are one, towards one destination and source

Discovery — A Long Journey

Discovery — A Long Journey

 

Spiritual sky inside and outside my soul, the world

Wind and rain in my heart and in my mind

Consciousness is everything, and everything else

Yet different, distinct — Diversity within unity

 

The Great House in the foothills of the mountains

With good farmland, and a castle on top of one of the mountains

Visible from every direction all around

Some of the students who live in the house go up to the castle

From time to time, if they need to consult the library there

Or meet with one of the Wizards of Light, or even an Elder One

A god or demon living on Earth temporarily or permanently

In this magical land halfway between the physical universe

And the World of Faerie, the dimension of old magic close to Earth

The Earth we know in our normal everyday lives, of business and politics

Yet this strange land separate yet connected to Physical Earth

Has its own politics and struggles for power and influence

Over the ancient secrets and knowledge held by the Wizards and Witches

In the magical library, and in the underground city below the mountains

Secrets that in the wrong hands could be disastrous for Earth

And all of the worlds, dimensions, universes connected to Earth and Faery

This mystical land is surrounded by mountains, isolated from the outside

World of material reality — Where subtle and obvious magic shows itself

In everyday life — The mere presence of the ancient beings of great power

Makes time pass differently than in the world of waking reality outside

In the city beneath the mountains are doorways leading many places

Secret tunnels connect with other sites of great power on Earth

Home to all manner of strange and beautiful creatures, artifacts

Of ancient races, futures past — Left by explorers when they traveled

To worlds, dimensions, and universes beyond the known, the physical

Even Faery, other realms connected with Earth — The land of the Sun

Moon and rain and wind — Meeting place for whole galaxies

The Multiverse of universes, timelines — Parallel, alternate, pocket

And beyond — A temperate rainforest of exquisite beauty

Thousands of shades of green in spring and summer, orange and red

In autumn — Surrounding the small town, the great house, the school

For young wizards and witches of light, and the castle above

And its peerless magical library — Intricately linked with the course

Of human history and the future of planet Earth — Though isolated

One of many places of ancient knowledge and wisdom from past and future

Home of the Keepers of Balance, Guardians of the Crossroads — Doors

And windows to perhaps an infinity of dimensions, worlds, universes

All connected to the one we know as our own — Even dreams of all life

Available to those who know the right door, and have the correct key

Worlds of light and darkness — Paradises and nightmares, heavens and hells

All with their particular place in the cosmic hierarchy and circle of life

Fractal spiral organization of spiritual, energetic, and physical realities

Holographic colocation of worlds — Yet separated by great distance

Of thought and energy, space and time, depending on perspective, perception

Knowledge of how to bridge the space between dimensions and worlds

The Wizard City, above and below the earth’s surface, is one nexus

Crossroads for the earth and the Milky Way and local universe

Yet the Wizards and Witches do not let this great power go their heads

They serve at the will of the elder races, the council of gods and demons

In charge of the gateways inside the Earth to and from other worlds

Even the farmers can visit other worlds if they have the inclination

And the permission of the gatekeepers, the various forces of dark and light

As long as the Balance is maintained, both sides remain happy, or at least

Content with compromise, shared power and control of Earth and dimensions

Universes beyond, yet connected to Earth — Into this world of magic

And infinite possibility, isolated yet connected to the rest of Earth

Power and influence over all worlds and people, it is possible for others

Outsiders to enter the hidden city, if they know the ways in and out

People all over the Waking World are called by circumstance, fate

Or destiny, to learn the ways of balance, guarding Earth’s role

In the cosmic drama — Struggles and conflicts undreamed of by most

Yet those who are called must choose a side — Light or Dark — Only

A few rebel and attempt neutrality, go into business for themselves

Playing both sides against each other for moral, ethical, philosophical

Or plain material reasons — Wealth and influence, measured in knowledge

Of the Elder Ones — Ancients — Arbiters of human destiny

And that of the Multiverse connected to Earth — A center

Of life, love stories spanning across galaxies, dimensions

Of Heaven and Hell, good and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos

The Underground City

The Underground City

 

Finding what is lost, or perhaps hidden

Congratulated by criminals, then attacked

For some things are meant to remain

Lost — Yet we want to discover them

Mystery that gives life meaning

More than remaining content

With the banalities of well-ordered

Existence — For at least a little while

We crave moments of adventure and exploration

Changing and growing — Becoming

Always within the great mystery of the Universe

Infinite possibilities — Borderland between worlds

Gates, doors, windows — Crossroads of the Multiverse

Containing the Physical Universe as well — The Underground

Too — City of impossible possibilities — Almost anything

You could want can be found, for a price — That which is free

Is the highest cost — Baby dragons, trolls, elves, even humans

All manner of magical creatures, refugees from the World of Faerie

Sometimes even royalty, carving out their own realm of influence

Close to Earth, the land of the waking and sunlight, mundane reality

They are responsible for many of the wonders here, there

Giving even the most industrial a spark of magic, even in the most

Grey places, especially there, in the corporate boardrooms

Magic is afoot — But there are always rules, as with any great power

And consequences for breaking with tradition and the old ways

But that does not stop those who are greedy for power, fame, love

Exploiting the artifacts and beings from other worlds beyond the physical

For selfish and short-sighted purposes — Ancient wisdom and knowledge

Turned to evil means if not evil ends — But there is always more good

Guardians of the ancient ways and the new as well, working for The Balance

Against unrestrained Darkness inside and outside each individual human

Soul — Light overcoming Shadow — No matter how necessary in small amounts

To preserve and protect Life — The gateway between worlds must remain

Safe from undue influence from creatures of darkness — The Crossroads

World of Dreams, playground for gods, demons, faeries — The Key to the Universe

Revolving around the Earth, focal point of human consciousness — Useful conceit

Protection from outside forces — The elements of wind, fire, water, earth, sky

The  ocean and the shore, the stairway circling upwards to heavenly worlds

And downwards to more earthy realms — The purple dome of the underground city

Architecture of all times and places combined in a strange milieu of mystery

Many cultures, races, beings of light and darkness — Even parallel universes

Different for each visitor, shared for those with strong bonds of friendship

Or antagonism — Love, growing and changing together, alone — Possibility

Becoming, being — Five dimensions, elements — Beyond time yet within all times

Always self-existing, circular — The center of the long staircase — The Star

Eye in the triangle — All that is, was, and shall be — Alone, together — True Love Eternal

Center of the Future: The Game of Love

Center of the Future: The Game of Love

 

We both want to be with you, she says — I love you

And I believe her, and I still love her, just not the same

Kind of love as hers — Longing and deep desire

Threatening to overpower every other waking thought

Obsession — And no escape even in dreams — Needing

To want to be with the other — And we will always love

Each other — No matter what happens, how much pain

And sorrow comes from being apart from you

There is always a way, a possibility for happiness

Kurt Vonnegut on how to write a short story

via youtube.com

Happy Birthday Jorge Luis Borges, Writer, Poet, Critic, Translator, and Dreamer (Born August 24, 1899) – Wikiquote

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All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-08-24 – 1986-06-14) was an Argentine writer who is considered one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Most famous in the English speaking world for his short stories and fictive essays, Borges was also a poet, critic, translator and man of letters.

Contents [hide] 1 Quotes 1.1 Discussion (1932) 1.2 Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) 1.3 The Garden of Forking Paths (1942) 1.3.1 The Garden of Forking Paths 1.4 Ficciones (1944) 1.5 Other Inquisitions (1952) 1.5.1 The Analytical Language of John Wilkins 1.5.2 The Modesty of History 1.6 Dreamtigers (1960) 1.7 Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968) 1.8 Autobiographical Notes (1970) 2 Unsourced 3 Quotes about Borges 4 External links

[edit] Quotes

In these selections the quotes from a story or essay are listed among the earliest collections which are known to contain it.

Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.

• If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.
  • “To the Reader” ["A quien leyere"], preface to Fervor of Buenos Aires [Fervor de Buenos Aires] (1923)

• Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local color; I found this confirmation in Gibbon‘s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local color.
  • “The Argentine Writer and Tradition”, Fervor of Buenos Aires (1923)

• Wilde was not a great poet nor a consummate prose writer. He was a very astute Irishman who encompassed in epigrams an esthetic credo which others before him scattered in the space of long pages. He was an enfant terrible.
  • “A Poem by Oscar Wilde” (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.

• That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.
  • Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 2

• 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.
  • Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

• Reading … is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
  • Universal History of Infamy [Historia universal de la infamia] (1935) Preface

• The vast ineptitude of his pretense would be a convincing proof that this was no fraud.
  • “The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro”, in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art’s temptations: that of being a genius.
  • “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim” (1935)

• Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.
  • “The masked dyer Hakim of Merv” [El tintorero enmascarado Hakim de Merv] Universal History of Infamy (1935); also translated as “Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv” (review of “Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv”)

• The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
  • “Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv”, in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998). Cf. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)

• The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.
  • “The Library of Babel” ["La Biblioteca de Babel"] (1941) First lines

Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

• I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the “vain and superstitious habit” of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one’s hand.
  • “The Library of Babel” (1941); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.
  • May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
    • “The Library of Babel” (1941)
  • Variants:
  • I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man — even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.
  • May Heaven exist, even if our place is Hell.
    • “Deutsches Requiem”. (Emece edition, 1974).

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

• El original es infiel a la traducción.
  • The original is unfaithful to the translation.
  • On William Thomas Beckford‘s Vathek (1782) and Samuel Henley’s 1786 translation, in “Sobre el Vathek de William Beckford” (1943)

• I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out post cards. . . I saw the oblique shadow of some ferns on the floor of a hot-house; I saw tigers, emboli, bison, ground swells and armies; I saw all the ants in the world.
  • “The Aleph” ["El Aleph"] (1945)

• Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
  • Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946)

• There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal.
  • “The Immortal”, § IV, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
  • Variant: To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

• There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.
  • “The Immortal” (1949)

I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.

• No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
  • “The Immortal” (1949)

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.

• 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.
  • “A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz”, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
  • Variant: Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment — the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

• Besides, time, which despoils castles, enriches verses . . . Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
  • “Averroës’ Search” (1949)

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

• There’s no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
  • “Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
  • “Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth”, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• His many years had reduced and polished him the way water smooths and polishes a stone or generations of men polish a proverb.
  • “The Man on the Threshold”, in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998). Cf. “The South” in Ficciones” (1944)

• I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. [...] The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
  • A Universal History of Iniquity, preface to the 1954 edition; tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
  • “Deutsches Requiem” as translated by Julian Palley (1958)

• Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.
  • “The Waiting” translated by James E. Irby (1959)

Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon…

• Years of solitude had taught him that, in one’s memory, all days tend to be the same, but that there is not a day, not even in jail or in the hospital, which does not bring surprises, which is not a translucent network of minimal surprises.
  • “The Waiting” translated by James E. Irby (1959)

• Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
  • “Partial Magic in the Quixote”, Labyrinths (1964)

• The heresies we should fear are those which can be confused with orthodoxy.
  • The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

• Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
  • The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

• Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird’s cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
  • The Theologians, translated by James E. Irby (1964)

Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.

• Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.
  • Razed the garden, profaned the chalices and the altars, by horse the Huns broke into the Monastic library and they tore the incomprehensible books and they vituperated them and they burnt them, fearing their symbols and characters might be concealing secret blasphemies against their God, who was an iron scimitar…
  • The Theologians [Los Teólogos]

• Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
  • Preface to Dr. Brodie’s Report [El informe de Brodie] (1970)

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.

• He sospechado alguna vez que la única cosa sin misterio es la felicidad, porque se justifica por sí sola.
  • I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
  • “Unworthy”, in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
  • Variant: I have thought from time to time that the only thing without mystery is happiness, since it justifies itself.

• My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
  • Dr. Brodie’s Report [El informe de Brodie] (1970)

• 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.
  • “Juan Muraña”, in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

• The poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the poverty we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well.
  • “The Elderly Lady”, in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• We all think that fate has dealt us a wretched sort of lot in life, and that others must be better. [...] I presume that in the heaven of the Blessèd there are those who believe that the advantages of that locale are much exaggerated by theologists, who have never been there themselves.
  • “The Duel”, in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
  • “Guayaquil”, in Brodie’s Report (1970); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
  • “The Threatened”, The Book of Sand [El Libro de arena] (1975)

• El hecho ocurrió en el mes de febrero de 1969, al norte de Boston, en Cambridge. No lo escribí inmediatamente porque mi primer propósito fue olvidarlo, para no perder la razón.
  • The event took place in the month of February of 1969, to the north of Boston, in Cambridge. I didn’t write it right away because my first intention was to forget it, not to loose reason.
  • “The Other” ["El Otro"], The Book of Sand (1975)

• Ser conservador es una forma de ser escéptico.
  • Being conservative is a way of being skeptic.
    • Interview in Revista Extra (July 1976)

The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library … Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.

• Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
  • “The Divine Comedy” (1977)

• Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
  • Comparing film and stage theatre in “The Divine Comedy” (1977)

• The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
  • “Poetry” (1977)

The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.

• The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
  • “Poetry” (1977)

• There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.
  • “Poetry” (1977)

• As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don’t know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves — and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity — are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we’ll be just, well, cosmopolitans.
  • “A Conversation With Jorge Luis Borges”, Artful Dodge (April 1980)

• The man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
  • Shakespeare’s Memory, (1983); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
  • On the Falklands War, Time, 1983-02-14

Life itself is a quotation.

• A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
  • Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems: Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)

• Life itself is a quotation.
  • Quoted in Cool Memories (1987) by Jean Baudrillard, (trans. 1990) Ch. 5; heard by Baudrillard at a lecture given in Paris.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

• Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you’re writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader’s imagination will reject it.
  • Discussion published in the Columbia Forum and later quoted in Worldwide Laws of Life : 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles (1998) by John Templeton

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

• I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
  • “A History of Eternity” in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger

• I turn to the most promising example: the bird. The habit of flocking; smallness; similarity of traits; their ancient connection with the two twilights, the beginnings of days, and the endings; the fact of being more often heard than seen — all of this moves us to acknowledge the primacy of the species and the almost perfect nullity of individuals. Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: “the nightingale that devours time.” Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one.
  • “A History of Eternity” in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger

• El infierno y el paraíso me parecen desproporcionados. Los actos de los hombres no merecen tanto.
  • Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
  • As quoted in Borges Verbal (1999) edited by Pilar Bravo and Mario Paoletti, p. 156

[edit] Discussion (1932)

Discusión (1932)

From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events.

• Life and death have been lacking in my life.
  • Prologue

• Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
  • “The Postulation of Reality” ["La postulación de la realidad"] (1931)

We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world…

• The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
  • “Note on Walt Whitman” ["Nota sobre Walt Whitman"]

• Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.
  • “Gauchesque Poetry” ["La poesía gauchesca"]

• It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his “nocturnes” answered: “All of my life.” With the same rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events.
  • “Gauchesque Poetry”

• We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
  • “Avatars of the Tortoise” ["Avatares de la tortuga"]

It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much…

• Hay un concepto que es el corruptor y el desatinador de los otros. No hablo del mal cuyo limitado imperio es la ética; hablo del infinito.
  • There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.
  • “Avatars of the Tortoise”
    • Variant translations:
    • One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
    • There is a concept that is the corruptor and dazzler of others. I’m not talking about the evil whose limited empire is the ethic; I’m talking about infinity.
    • There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

• He transforms all concepts into incommunicable, solidified objects. To refute him is to become contaminated with unreality.
  • On F. H. Bradley in “Avatars of the Tortoise”

It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them — at least in an infinitesimal way — does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

• It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious coordinations, one of them — at least in an infinitesimal way — does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others.

• The central problem of novel-writing is causality.
  • “Narrative Art and Magic” ["El arte narrativo y la magia"]

• The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.
  • “On Dubbing” ["Sobre el doblaje"]

[edit] Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)

First translated by James E. Irby (1961)

Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.

• I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.
  • First lines

• One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.
  • Variant translation: Mirrors and copulation are obscene, for they increase the numbers of mankind.
  • Cf. “Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv”, in A Universal History of Iniquity (1935)

• Para uno de esos gnosticos, el visible universo era una ilusion o (mas precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan.
  • For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.

• In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do many Englishmen.
  • Variant: In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then.

This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.

• Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor — an infinite Leibniz laboring away darkly and modestly — has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers… directed by an obscure man of genius. Individuals mastering these diverse disciplines are abundant, but not so those capable of inventiveness and less so those capable of subordinating that inventiveness to a rigorous and systematic plan. This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, and irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally. Let it suffice for me to recall that the apparent contradictions of the Eleventh Volume are the fundamental basis for the proof that the other volumes exist, so lucid and exact is the order observed in it.

• Hume noted for all time that Berkeley‘s arguments did not admit the slightest refutation nor did they cause the slightest conviction. This dictum is entirely correct in its application to the earth, but entirely false in Tlön. The nations of this planet are congenitally idealist. Their language and the derivations of their language — religion, letters, metaphysics — all presuppose idealism. The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial.

• One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
  • Variant: This happy conjecture affirmed that there is only one subject, that this indivisible subject is every being in the universe and that these beings are the organs and masks of the divinity.

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.

• The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.

• It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.

• The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase “all aspects” is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments.

• One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.
  • Variants: One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that past is no more than present memory . . . Another maintains that the universe is comparable to those code systems in which not all the symbols have meaning, and in which only that which happens every three hundredth night is true…
    • The history of the universe… is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon.

• Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such a pain, such and such a greenish-yellow colour, such and such a temperature, such and such a sound, etc., make up the only reality there is. All men, in the climactic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
  • Variant: Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.

[edit] The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1942) is a collection of short stories, taking its title from one of them.

My undertaking is not difficult, essentially… I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

• 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.
  • Preface; Variant translations:
    • It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them… A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.
    • The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.

Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.

• My undertaking is not difficult, essentially… I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
  • “Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote” ["Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote"]

• There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy.
  • “Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote”
    • Variant: There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

• Every man should be capable of all ideas and I understand that in the future this will be the case.
  • “Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote”

• I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.
  • “The Lottery in Babylon”; tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
  • Variant: I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

[edit] The Garden of Forking Paths

This short story was first translated by Donald A. Yates (1958)

A labyrinth of symbols… An invisible labyrinth of time.

• It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.
  • Variant translation: It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.

• I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . .

• 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.
  • Variant translation: I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left… Whosoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

• I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

• I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

• A labyrinth of symbols… An invisible labyrinth of time.

• Ts’ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

• I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

• In the work of Ts’ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.

This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.

• Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

• In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?

• The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts’ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.
  • Variant translation: This web of time — the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries — embrace every possibility.

• Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

[edit] Ficciones (1944)

Ficciones is a collection of stories that includes all those of The Garden of Forking Paths, first English translation by Anthony Kerrigan (1962)

What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men…

• The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.
  • “Funes the Memorious” ["Funes El Memorioso"] (1944); also published in Labyrinths (1964)

• That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvellous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable….
  • “Theme of the Traitor and Hero”

• What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.
  • “The Form of the Sword”

You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not.

• “It’s possible, but not interesting,” Lonnrot answered. “You will reply that reality hasn’t the slightest need to be of interest. And I’ll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not. In the hypothesis you have postulated, chance intervenes largely. Here lies a dead rabbi; I should prefer a purely rabbinical explanation; not the imaginary mischances of an imaginary robber.”
  • “Death and the Compass“

• “Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions,” murmmured Lönnrot.
  “Like Christianity,” the editor put in.
  • “Death and the Compass”

The time for your labor has been granted.

• The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
  • “The Secret Miracle“

• Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned.
  • “The Secret Miracle”; Variant: Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

• The time for your labor has been granted.
  • “The Secret Miracle”

• Toward dawn, he dreamed that he was in hiding, in one of the naves of the Clementine Library. What are you looking for? a librarian wearing dark glasses asked him. I’m looking for God, Hladik replied. God, the librarian said, is in one of the letters on one of the pages of one of the four hundred thousand volumes in the Clementine. My parents and my parents’ parents searched for that letter; I myself have gone blind searching for it.
  • “The Secret Miracle”

• In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
  • “Three Versions of Judas”

• On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence. He was dark, dried up , diminutive, and seemed outside time, situated in eternity.
  • “The South”. Cf. “The Man on the Threshold”, in The Aleph (1949)
  • Variant: On the floor, curled against the bar, lay an old man, as motionless as an object. The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying is polished by generations of mankind.
    • tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• If Dahlmann was without hope, he was also without fear. As he crossed the threshold, he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with the needle. He felt that if he had been able to choose, then, or to dream his death, this would have been the death he would have chosen or dreamt. Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.
  • “The South”

[edit] Other Inquisitions (1952)

Otras inquisiciones (1952); first translated by Ruth L. C. Simms as Other Inquisitions, 1937–1952 (1964)

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

• And yet, and yet … Negar la sucesión temporal, negar el yo, negar el universo astronómico, son desesperaciones aparentes y consuelos secretos. Nuestro destino no es espantoso por irreal: es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro. El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho. El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo desgraciadamente es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges.
  • And yet, and yet . . . Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
  • “A New Refutation of Time” (1946) ["Nueva refutación del tiempo"]
  • Variant translations:
    • And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are obvious acts of desperation and secret consolation. Our fate (unlike the hell of Swedenborg or the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironclad. Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
    • Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

• I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
  • “New Refutation of Time”

• Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.
  • “The Wall and the Books” ["La muralla y los libros"] (1950)
    • Variant translation: Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.

• Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.
  • “Pascal’s Sphere” ["La esfera de Pascal"] (1951)
    • Variant translations: Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.
    • It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

• 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.
  • “Nathaniel Hawthorne“

One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

• “Wakefield” prefigures Franz Kafka, but the latter modifies, and sharpens, the reading of “Wakefield.” The debt is mutual; a great writer creates his or her precursors. He or she creates them and in some fashion justifies them.
  • “Nathaniel Hawthorne”

• In the critic’s vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
  • “Kafka and His Precursors” ["Kafka y sus precursores"], as translated in Labyrinths (1964)
    • Variant translation: The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

• 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.
  • “Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw” ["Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw"] (1951)

• Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
  • “Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”
    • Variant translation: A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time — this one, for instance — as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.

There is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

• The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
  • “Creation and P.H. Gosse” ["La creacin y P.H. Gosse"]

• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
  • “The Meeting in a Dream”

• In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
  • “The Flower of Coleridge” ["La flor de Coleridge"] — The title of this work makes reference to a line by Samuel Coleridge in Anima Poetæ : From the Unpublished Note-books of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1895), p. 282 : “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awake — Aye, what then?”

• Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James.
  • “The Nightingale of Keats”

[edit] The Analytical Language of John Wilkins

“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” (in Spanish & English)

It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.

If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.

• These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages 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.

• It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
  • As translated by Will Fitzgerald

• Cabe ir más lejos; cabe sospechar que no hay universo en el sentido orgánico, unificador, que tiene esa ambiciosa palabra. Si lo hay, falta conjeturar su propósito; falta conjeturar las palabras, las definiciones, las etimologías, las sinonimias, del secreto diccionario de Dios.
  • We can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense, that this ambitious term has. If there is a universe, its aim is not conjectured yet; we have not yet conjectured the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.
    • As translated by Lilia Graciela Vázquez
    • Variant: We can go further; we suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word. If there is, we must conjecture its purpose; we must conjecture the words, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, from the secret dictionary of God.

• 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. The analytic language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of such patterns.
  • As translated by Lilia Graciela Vázquez
  • Variant: The impossibility of penetrating the divine scheme of the universe does not, however, dissuade us from planning human schemes, even though we know they must be provisional. The Analytic Language of Wilkins is not the least admirable of these schemes.
    • As translated by Will Fitzgerald

[edit] The Modesty of History

A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing.

• On September 20, 1792, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who had accompanied the Duke of Weimar on a military expedition to Paris) saw the finest army of Europe inexplicably repulsed at Valmy by some French militiamen, and said to his disconcerted friends: “In this place and on this day, a new epoch in the history of the world is beginning, and we shall be able to say that we have been present at its origin.” Since that time historic days have been numerous, and one of the tasks of governments (especially in Italy, Germany, and Russia) has been to fabricate them or to simulate them with an abundance of preconditioning propaganda followed by relentless publicity.

• I have suspected that history, real history, is more modest and that its essential dates may be, for a long time, secret. A Chinese prose writer has observed that the unicorn, because of its own anomaly, will pass unnoticed. Our eyes see what they are accustomed to seeing. Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion, although his book recorded it.

• There is a flavor that our time (perhaps surfeited by the clumsy imitations of professional patriots) does not usually perceive without some suspicion: the fundamental flavor of the heroic.

• Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply. It is as if a Carthaginian had bequeathed to us the memory of the exploit of Regulus. Saxo Grammaticus wrote with justification in his Gesta Danorum: “The men of Thule [Iceland] are very fond of learning and of recording the history of all peoples and they are equally pleased to reveal the excellences of others or of themselves.”
  Not the day when the Saxon said the words, but the day when an enemy perpetuated them, was the historic date. A date that is a prophecy of something still in the future: the day when races and nations will be cast into oblivion, and the solidarity of all mankind will be established.

[edit] Dreamtigers (1960)

El hacedor : literal translation: The Maker; first translated as Dreamtigers (1964)

Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

• Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
  • “Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote” (January 1955)
  • Variant: In the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.
    • Tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)

• Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
  • “Poem of the Gifts” ["Poema de los Dones"]

• The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
  • “Dead Men’s Dialogue”

• A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
  • Afterword

[edit] Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1968)

On Federico Garcia Lorca.

• “I suppose he had the good luck to be executed, no? I had an hour’s chat with him in Buenos Aires. He struck me as a kind of play actor, no? Living up to a certain role. I mean, being a professional Andalusian… But in the case of Lorca, it was very strange bcause I lived in Andalusia and the Andalusians aren’t a bit like that. His were stage Andalusians. Maybe he thought that in Buenos Aires he had to live up to that character, but in Andalusia, people are not like that. In fact, if you are in Andalusia, if you are talking to a man of letters and you speak to him about bullfights, he’ll say, ‘Oh well, that sort of this pleases people, I suppose, but really the torero works in no danger whatsoever. Because they are bored by these things, because every writer is bored by the local color in his own country. Well, when I met Lorca, he was being a professional Andalusian… Besides, Lorca wanted to astonish us. He said to me that he was very troubled about a very important figure in the contemporary world. A character in whom he could see all the tragedy of American life. And then he went on in this way until I asked him who was this character and it turned out this character was Mickey Mouse. I suppose he was trying to be clever. And I thought, ‘That’s the kind of thing you say when you are very, very young and you want to astonish somebody.’ But after all, he was a grown man, he had no need, he could have talked in a different way. But when he started in about Mickey Mouse being a symbol of America, there was a friend of mine there and he looked at me and I looked at him and we both walked away because we were too old for that kind of game, no? Even at that time.”
  • Richard Burgin, Conversation with Jorge Luis Borges, pages 92-93.

• “Well, [Lorca had] a gift for gab. For example, he makes striking metaphors, but I think he makes striking metaphors for him, because I think that his world was mostly verbal.I think that he was fond of playing words against each other, the contrast of words, but I wonder if he knew what he was doing.”
  • Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges, Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1968. Pages 93-94.

On Pablo Neruda

• “Well, he wrote a book — well, maybe here I’m being political — he wrote a book about the tyrants of South America, and then he had several stanzas against the United States. Now he knows that that’s rubbish. And he had not a word against Perón. Because he had a law suit in Buenos Aires, that was explained to me afterwards, and he didn’t care to risk anything. And so, when he was supposed to be writing at the top of his voice, full of noble indignation, he had not a word to say against Perón. And he was married to an Argentine lady, he knew that many of his friends had been sent to jail. He knew all about the state of our country, but not a word against him. At the same time, he was speaking against the United States, knowing the whole thing was a lie, no? But, of course, that doesn’t mean anything against his poetry. Neruda is a very fine poet, a great poet in fact. And when they gave Miguel de Asturias the Nobel Prize, I said that it should have been given to Neruda! Now when I was in Chile, and we were on different political sides, I think he did the best thing to do. He went on a holiday during the three or four days I was there so there was no occasion for our meeting. But I think he was acting politely, no? Because he knew that people would be playing him up against me, no? I mean, I was an Argentine, poet, he was a Chilean poet, he’s on the side of the Communists, I’m against them. So I felt he was behaving very wisely in avoiding a meeting that would have been quite uncomfortable for both of us.”
  • Page 96.

[edit] Autobiographical Notes (1970)

Published in The New Yorker, 1970-09-11

• This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.

• Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could — a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one.

• I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This — amateur Protestant that I am — I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.

• Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
  • Cada vez que leo algo que han escrito contra mi, no sólo comparto el sentimiento sino que pienso que yo mismo podría hacer mejor el trabajo, quizá debería aconsejar a los aspirantes a enemigos que me envíen sus criticas de antemano, con la seguridad de que recibirán toda mi ayuda y mi apoyo. Hasta he deseado secretamente escribir con seudónimo, una larga invectiva contra mí mismo.
  • “Jorge Luis Borges visto por él mismo” (Jorge Luis Borges seen by himself) In the case of this work, the Spanish version seems to have been published after the English version.

[edit] Unsourced

• ¿De qué otra forma se puede amenazar que no sea de muerte? Lo interesante, lo original, sería que alguien lo amenace a uno con la inmortalidad.
  • How else can one threaten, other than with death? The interesting, the original thing, would be to threaten someone with immortality.

• El fútbol es popular porque la estupidez es popular.
  • Football [soccer] is popular because stupidity is popular.

• En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí.
  • I tried mescaline and cocaine in my youth, but i immediately switched to mint candy, which was more stimulating. I am not interested in drugs if they produce the same effects as alcohol. A drunkard is evidently ridiculous. I have been drunk some times, and I remember them as horrible experiences for me and everyone else.

• Hay que tener cuidado al elegir a los enemigos porque uno termina pareciéndose a ellos.
  • One must choose one’s enemies carefully, as one ends up resembling them.

• He cometido el peor pecado que uno puede cometer. No he sido feliz.
  • I have committed the worst sin that can be committed. I have not been happy.

• La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
  • Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

• Que cada hombre construya su propia catedral. ¿Para qué vivir de obras de arte ajenas y antiguas?
  • Let each one build their own cathedral. Why live from alien and ancient works of art?

• Que otros se jacten de las páginas que han escrito; a mi me enorgullecen las que he leído.
  • Let others brag about the pages they have written; I’m proud of those I’ve read.
  • Variant: Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído.
    • You are what you are not for what you’ve written, but for what you’ve read.

• Sólo aquello que se ha ido es lo que nos pertenece.
  • Only that which is gone belongs to us.

• Uno está enamorado cuando se da cuenta de que otra persona es única.
  • One is in love when one realizes that the other person is unique.

• Yo no hablo de venganzas ni perdones, el olvido es la única venganza y el único perdón.
  • I don’t speak of revenge or forgiveness; forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.

• I think I understood love better when I had no love.

• Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream.

• Democracy is an abuse of statistics.

• I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors . . . Perhaps I would have liked to be my father, who wrote and had the decency of not publishing. Nothing, nothing, my friend; what I have told you: I am not sure of anything, I know nothing. . . Can you imagine that I not even know the date of my death?

• Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born — August 24, 1899 — they have not been granting it to me.

• Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

• The image of the Lord had been replaced by a mirror.

• Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

• “The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.”

• “I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.” — Introduction to The Book of Sand

• “I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.”

[edit] Quotes about Borges

Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges’ thought. ~ James Irby

• Extremes of fantastic hope and skepticism paradoxically coexist in Borges’ thought. In “Pascal’s Sphere” he examines an image which is not only paradoxical in itself — the universe as an infinite sphere, in other words, a boundless form perfectly circumscribed — but which has also served to express diametrically opposite emotions: Bruno‘s elation and Pascal‘s anguish. But the other basic symmetry to note here is Borges’ history of the metaphor. Not only paradoxes are found throughout this collection, but also various listings of ideas or themes or images which though diverse in origin and detail are essentially the same. In “The Flower of Coleridge” the coincidence of Valéry‘s, Emerson‘s, and Shelley‘s conceptions of all literature as the product of one Author seems itself to bear out that conception. At the beginning of the essay on Hawthorne, Borges again briefly traces the history of a metaphor — the likening of our dreams to a theatrical performance — and adds that true metaphors cannot be invented, since they have always existed. Such “avatars” point beyond the flux and diversity of history to a realm of eternal archetypes, which, though limited in number, “can be all things for all people, like the Apostle.” While the paradox upsets our common notions of reality and suggests that irreducible elements are actually one, recurrence negates history and the separateness of individuals. Of course, this too is a paradox, as “New Refutation of Time” shows: time must exist in order to provide the successive identities with which it is to be “refuted.” The two symmetries noted above, if we pursue their implications far enough, finally coalesce, with something of the same dizzying sense, so frequent in Borges’ stories, of infinite permutations lurking at every turn. Both are uses of what he calls a pantheist extension of the principle of identity — God is all things: a suitably heterogeneous selection of these may allude to Totality — which has, as he notes in the essay on Whitman, unlimited rhetorical possibilities.
  • James Irby in the Introduction to Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 (1952) as translated by Translated by Ruth L. C. Simms (1964)

• When I met Borges some time ago and remarked that I was about to embark on writing a book about Schopenhauer, he became excited and started talked volubly about how much Schopenhauer had meant to him. It was the desire to read Schopenhauer in the original, he said, that had made him learn German; and when people asked him, which they often had, why he with his love of intricate structure had never attempted a systematic exposition of the world-view which underlay his writings, his reply was that he did not do it because it had already been done by Schopenhauer.
  • Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, pg. 389

[edit] External links

• The Modern Word: The Garden of Forking Paths – a comprehensive Web site dedicated to exploring Borges and his work,
• Internetaleph – Fully bilingual (English/Spanish) portal dedicated to Jorge Luis Borges
• Jorge Luis Borges: a first introduction to the author’s prose work
• The Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies and Documentation
• Three stories by Borges
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
• Review of “Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv”
• “A Shameless Plug for Jorge Luis Borges” at everything2.com
• Pagina 12 : Borge’s Cites (in Spanish)

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Categories: Authors | Latin American poets | Short story writers | Critics | Argentines | 1980s deaths

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