Jorge Luis Borges

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.

We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !

Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself

My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.

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.

The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.

It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.

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.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

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.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

A writer's work is the product of laziness.