“I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.”

The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.

Everything touches everything.

My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.

Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.

I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer – if there is any afterlife – to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.

The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?

Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.

I have committed the worst of sins one can commit. I have not been happy.

Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.

It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.

So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.

Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.

Of the eternal incorporeal substance nothing is changed, is formed or deformed, but there always remains only that thing which cannot be a subject of dissolution, since it is not possible that it be a subject of composition, and therefore, either of itself or by accident, it cannot be said to die.

Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?

I may not hope from outward forms to win / The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past…

Seduction is, first and foremost, an art form. And seduction should not always be treated as a wild celebration. In fact, it’s more of an evocation of what you do. It’s more an evocation of seduction.

Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source.

The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.