165 quotes found
“We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.”
“There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.”
“I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.”
“I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which...”
“There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almos...”
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
“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 im...”
“Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”
“Paradise will be a kind of library”
“Of all mans instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the...”
“Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.”
“The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarm repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; tout aboutit en un livre, everything ends ...”
“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 dragons image that fits mans imagination, and this ac...”
“All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.”
“I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory ima...”
“If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vastI mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven peopleperhaps ...”
“I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror”
“To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”
“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
