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 BorgesRead
As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that as life diminishes, memories fade and only the significance of words remains.
Jorge Luis Borges reflects on the nature of memory and the essence of communication as life draws to a close. It implies that memories, once vivid and rich, may dissolve, leaving behind only the impactful words spoken or written. In this way, it highlights the enduring nature of language and the way it encapsulates our experiences, even when our recollections begin to fade.
In practice
During a memorial service, one might quote Borges to emphasize the importance of the words we share.
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.
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
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.
For what am I to myself without You, but a guide to my own downfall?
History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging. What has happened before will perforce happen again.
Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.
A good cause need not be tarnished by its most fanatical expressions. But it is rarely helped by them.
You can't have occupation and human rights.
The magistrates are the ministers for the laws, the judges their interpreters, the rest of us are servants of the law, that we all may be free.
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