1. “We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.”
2. “Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.”
3. “The central problem of novel-writing is causality.”
4. “I have always come to life after coming to books.”
5. “To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.”
6. “Today is tomorrow and yesterday.”
7. “I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.”
8. “Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.”
9. “Of all man’s 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 extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.”
10. “To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
11. “I don’t speak of vengeance, nor of forgiving; forgetting is the only revenge and the only forgiveness.”
12. “What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?”
13. “Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”
14. “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.”
15. “I don’t think there’s any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.”
16. “All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.”
17. “Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.”
18. “I do not know which of us has written this page.”
19. “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.”
20. “The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.”
21. “The time for your labor has been granted.”
22. “All writing is dreaming.”
23. “I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.”
24. “We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !”
25. “There is a saying that only the man who has already committed a crime and repented of it is incapable of that crime; to be free of an erroneous opinion, I myself might add, one must at some time have professed it.”
26. “Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.”
27. “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.”
28. “To bless thine enemy is a good way to satisfy thy vanity.”
29. “Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. It’s like a slow summer dusk.”
30. “What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.”
31. “Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.”
32. “Life itself is a quotation.”
33. “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.”
34. “Sometimes I suspect that good readers are even blacker and rarer swans than good writers.”
35. “Words, words, words taken out of place and mutilated, words from other men – those were the alms left him by the hours and the centuries.”
36. “The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.”
37. “The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.”
38. “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
39. “The taste of the apple… lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way… poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.”
40. “Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.”
41. “I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.”
42. “Every man should be capable of all ideas.”
43. “A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”
44. “I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.”
45. “There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.”
46. “The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely.”
47. “I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”
48. “The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.”
49. “Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.”
50. “Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.”
51. “While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one”
52. “The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.”
53. “There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.”
54. “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
55. “Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
56. “We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.”
57. “Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.”
58. “In my next life I will try to commit more errors.”
59. “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
60. “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 vast – I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people – perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven – but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one’s imagination.”
61. “Poetry springs from something deeper; it’s beyond intelligence.”
62. “I think it’s all to the good that a writer shouldn’t be too famous. Because, in a country where a writer may be famous, he may be pandering to the mob, celebrity and so on.”
63. “Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”
64. “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”
65. “What is past is what is real.”
66. “He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.”
67. “There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.”
68. “Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.”
69. “A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.”
70. “Time is living me.”
71. “Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
72. “Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.”
73. “A writer always begins by being too complicated – he’s playing at several games at once.”
74. “I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.”
75. “I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
76. “The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.”
77. “Happy is he who forgives others and who forgives himself.”
78. “I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.”
79. “I would say, however, that romantic sentiment is a keen and pathetic sense of time, a few hours of amorous delight, the idea that everything passes away; a deeper sentiment for autumn, for twilight, for the passing nature of our own lives.”
80. “That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.”
81. “Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.”
82. “The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”
83. “My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.”
84. “I live in a grey world, rather like the silver screen world. But yellow stands out.”
85. “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”
86. “The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said.”
87. “From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.”
88. “His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.”
89. “Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”
90. “Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.”
91. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”
92. “I ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.”
93. “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.”
94. “Little has happened to me in my lifetime, but I have read much.”
95. “God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”
96. “There is no greater comfort than the idea that we have chosen our own misfortunes.”
97. “Canada is so far away it hardly exists.”
98. “Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”
99. “Best thing to happen for a poet. A fine death, no? An impressive death.”
100. “Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.”
101. “I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left…”
102. “I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.”
103. “To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”
104. “Everything touches everything.”
105. “Only in the present do things happen.”
106. “The steps a man takes from the day of his birth until that of his death trace in time an inconcievable figure. The Divine Mind intuitively grasps that form immediately, as men do a triangle.”
107. “In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.”
108. “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
109. “I’m alone and nobody is in the mirror.”
110. “The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.”
111. “The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.”
112. “Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.”
113. “Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”
114. “Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.”
115. “Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
116. “Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.”
117. “For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”
118. “The fact is that each writer creates his own precursors.”
119. “What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.”
120. “I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”
121. “I think most people are more important than their opinions.”
122. “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
123. “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.”
124. “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
125. “I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.”
126. “Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.”
127. “I leave to various future times, but not to all, my garden of forking paths.”
128. “Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.”
129. “No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I’ve not read more than half a dozen.”
130. “We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.”
131. “Each thing implies the universe.”
132. “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.”
133. “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”
134. “The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.”
135. “There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.”
136. “Death is just infinity closing in.”
137. “The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”
138. “So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.”
139. “i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.”
140. “My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.”
141. “The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.”
142. “Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.”
143. “It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.”
144. “In art nothing is more secondary than the author’s intentions.”
145. “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 I have visited.”
146. “Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality.”
147. “Why a should a dream be any less real than this table. Or Macbeth be less real than today’s newspaper.”
148. “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.”
149. “The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral…”
150. “My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.”
151. “My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.”
152. “To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
153. “As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight.”
154. “Time is the substance of which we are made.”
155. “I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up; it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there’s nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.”