165 quotes found
“I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility ...”
“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses simultaneously all of them. He thus creates var...”
“I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to atta...”
“In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect.”
“I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be ...”
“So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.”
“The metaphysicians of Tln are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.”
“I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness”
“Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
“One day or one nightbetween my days and nights, what difference can there be?I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I wo...”
“The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past tur...”
“Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing”
“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; ...”
“One of the schools in Tln 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 the past is no more than p...”
“It was under English trees that I meditated on that lost labyrinth: I pictured it perfect and inviolate on the secret summit of a mountain; I pictured its outlines blurred by rice paddies, or under...”
“Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.”
“Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within”
“We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors.”
“A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a moun...”
“Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.Borges: In fact, thats what it is. If we ...”
