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The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

Jorge Luis Borges

The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Literature Metaphor Myself Sea
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Country Enemy Garden Man Moments Nature Stream
In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Dreams Feeling Horror Sensation
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Known Reason Simplicity Universe
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Father Library Life Name
In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Choice Expense Face Fiction Man
Everything touches everything.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Connection One Liner Touch
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Writing
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Hope Memories Present Reality
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Conversation Death Forget Man
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Faith Original Translation
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Books Existence Fools Ideas Summary Writing
Reality favors symmetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Reality Symmetry
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creature Divine Ignorance Immortal Man Myself Terrible
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Embarrassment Fortune Improvement Ourselves
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creativity Forget Memories

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

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The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

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