Top 100 Quotes About Borges
#1. My friend you must understand that time forks perpetually into countless futures. And in at least one of them I have become your enemy. Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Adrian McKinty
#2. I read Borges, Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him ... he was a blind man who see better than anyone
Sheridan Hay
#3. When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
Jorge Luis Borges
#4. One of my favorite writers is short story writer/essayist Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind. I'm not claiming to be anything remotely resembling a talent of Borges' caliber, but he is an inspiration and a proof that one can be a meaningful and successful writer while blind.
Larry Howes
#5. When a person reaches a certain age, there are many things he or she can feign: happiness is not one of them
-- Jorge Luis Borges
Paul Illidge
#6. As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store.
William H Gass
#7. I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.
Jorge Luis Borges
#8. Borges was unapologetically smart and equally sentimental; a proto-geek, blind to distinctions between low pulp fiction and high criticism, experimental but never arch, and always playful, with a humor as dry as dust.
John Hodgman
#9. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#10. One of my heroes, almost necessarily from what I'm saying, of course, is Borges, who is a supreme master of doing thing
being a data bank
and the beauty of this economy is that he could have written War and Peace in three or four pages; who knows, it might have been a better book.
Peter Greenaway
#11. Oh, Buenos Aires, I have traveled around the world, but I've never been separated from you," said Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. And Saint Thomas said, "A friendship that can end has never been a true friendship." In
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#12. My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.
John Hodgman
#13. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen. - JORGE LUIS BORGES
Elizabeth Kolbert
#14. To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.
Joshua Foer
#15. It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.
Joshua Foer
#16. The bacillus of efficiency has also attacked football, and some dare to ask what's the point in playing well. I feel tempted to tell about the time they dared to ask Borges what is poetry for, to which he answered: 'What is a sunrise for? What are caresses for? What is the smell of coffee for?'
Jorge Valdano
#17. [Jorge Luis Borges] had short stories, and I was trying to learn how to write short stories, and then he had these things in the middle that were like fables, and I loved hearing fables.
Sandra Cisneros
#18. My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.
August Wilson
#19. Jorge Luis Borges: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." "The
Suzanne Kelman
#20. Words of wisdom, the meaning of life, p e r h a p s even the
answer sought by Borges's librarians - all of these may wash over us every day, but they can do little
for us unless we savor them, engage with them, question them, improve them, and connect them to our
lives
Jonathan Haidt
#21. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think - two very different men - said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited.
Bola
#22. I never really liked "cool" books. I plowed through as much Borges and Joyce as possible, read the first half of V. and spent whole Bar Mitzvah checks on Beat poetry.
Simon Rich
#23. Most of my influences from outside the commerical strange fiction genre came in with university, discovering James Joyce and Wallace Stevens, Blake and Yeats, Pinter and Borges. And meanwhile within those genres I was discovering Gibson and Shepard, Jeter and Powers, Lovecraft and Peake.
Hal Duncan
#24. Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum.
Paulo Coelho
#25. That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point.
James Sallis
#26. Style: There is something in too much verbal felicity (as in Joyce or Nabokov or Borges) that can betray the writer into technique for the sake of technique.
Edward Abbey
#27. Borges, who said, Defeat has a dignity which noisy victory does not deserve.
Paul Theroux
#29. There's something about Vonnegut's deadpan irony that I really like. And I like Borges' puzzle structure.
Ruth Ozeki
#30. As 'Possession' progresses, it seems less and less like the usual satire about academia and more like something by Jorge Luis Borges.
Jay Parini
#31. My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges
#32. I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take ... a kind of demonic joy in writing.
Paul Auster
#33. I love the three-act theory. It works and works beautifully. But you don't necessarily have to structure a story that way: Cortazar and Borges wrote in different structural styles.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#34. For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.
Alberto Manguel
#35. Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.
Padgett Powell
#36. I'm interested in everything. I don't see why Borges can't work along with Neil Gaiman, or Stephen King can't be mixed with Balzac. It's just storytelling; it's different ways of using codes and images and words and sounds.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#37. One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Brien's At Swim Two-Birds in the same way.
John Barth
#38. 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. JL Borges
Jan Karon
#39. Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment - the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
#40. Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
#41. I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.
Jorge Luis Borges
#42. If you want to be the best at anything (including the best version of yourself), you have to have systems in place for success. These systems are healthy habits!
Marco Borges
#43. There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
Jorge Luis Borges
#44. Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.
Jorge Luis Borges
#45. What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
Jorge Luis Borges
#46. 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.
Jorge Luis Borges
#47.
,all our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.
Jorge Luis Borges
#48. The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#49. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.
Jorge Luis Borges
#50. In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.
Jorge Luis Borges
#51. I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.
Jorge Luis Borges
#52. It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.
Jorge Luis Borges
#53. If you're a writer you're bound to write something fine, at least now and then, off and on.
Jorge Luis Borges
#54. We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon's image that fits man's imagination, and this accounts for the dragon's appearance in different places and periods.
Jorge Luis Borges
#55. Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.
Jorge Luis Borges
#58. In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
Jorge Luis Borges
#60. The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.
Jorge Luis Borges
#61. In death we shall rediscover all the instants of our life and we shall freely combine them as in dreams.
Jorge Luis Borges
#62. The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Jorge Luis Borges
#64. I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
Jorge Luis Borges
#65. I am attracted to fantastic writing, and fantastic reading, of course. But I think things that we call fantastic may be real, in the sense of being real symbols.
Jorge Luis Borges
#66. That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
Jorge Luis Borges
#67. A writer always begins by being too complicated - he's playing at several games at once.
Jorge Luis Borges
#68. I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal.
Jorge Luis Borges
#69. What will my redeemer be like? I wonder. Will he be a bull or a man? Will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? Or will he be like me?
Jorge Luis Borges
#70. When people write in favor or against anybody, that hardly helps or hurts them ... man can be done or undone by his own writing, not by what other people say of him.
Jorge Luis Borges
#71. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed it an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times.
Jorge Luis Borges
#72. At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.
Christopher Hitchens
#73. You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
Jorge Luis Borges
#74. What bitter slavishness, that of my face, that of one of my former faces. This odious fate reserved for my features must perforce make me odious too, but I no longer care.
Jorge Luis Borges
#75. At the end of the day, we each have a different definition for beauty, but being yourself is the most important.
Maria Borges
#76. It is also said that it takes the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher
Jorge Luis Borges
#77. Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Jorge Luis Borges
#78. The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to contruct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the otherslike a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.
Jorge Luis Borges
#79. What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
#80. The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.
Jorge Luis Borges
#81. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.
Jorge Luis Borges
#82. My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
Jorge Luis Borges
#84. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
Jorge Luis Borges
#85. In spite of these three obstacles, Menard's fragmentary _Quixote_ is more subtle than Cervantes'.
Jorge Luis Borges
#86. The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
Jorge Luis Borges
#87. You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
Jorge Luis Borges
#88. The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: "Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one.
Jorge Luis Borges
#89. It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
Jorge Luis Borges
#90. His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
Jorge Luis Borges
#92. Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
Jorge Luis Borges
#93. The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
Jorge Luis Borges
#98. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.
Jorge Luis Borges
#99. Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
Jorge Luis Borges
#100. Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Jorge Luis Borges
