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In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

Jorge Luis Borges

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Cruelty Dictatorship Fact Leadership Oppression Politics
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Forever Form Ourselves Worst
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 BORGES

Day Different Measurement Money Time
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Actor Confession Man Observation Oneself Performance
He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

People Poet Prostitute Worst
We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Progress Stop
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Improvement Silence Talk Yourself
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Aesthetic Criticism Personal Reading
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Acceptance Experience Immortal World
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Life Live Lonely Need Share Writing
It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Choice Country Shame
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creation Fall Fall In Love God Religion
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
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ideas Novel Plane Reality

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

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Popular Authors

In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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