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

Jorge Luis Borges

When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expression Intimate Myself Necessary Possible Simplicity Writing
What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Known Myself Person Reach
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Immortal Live Truth Willing
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Detail Memories Myself Night Solitude Thinking Walk
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Blind Darkness Poet
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Experience Fall In Love Thinking
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
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Misunderstanding Reading Thinking
Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird’s cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creation Eyes Human Listening World
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Man Myself See Soldier
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Feeling Forever Himself Life Man Moments Realize
Only in the present do things happen.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Inspirational Moments Present
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Eyes Music Mysterious World
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Probability Reality
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Awake Fantasy Philosophy Science World
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Habit Life Lonely Worry Yourself
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Freedom Government Point Reach Time
Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Character Fools Myself Play Trick
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
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
We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Image Lost Replacement Shame Time
Every man should be capable of all ideas.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

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

Literature Metaphor Myself Sea
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Myself Sleep
He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

People Poet Prostitute Worst
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Death End Infinity Sleep Wake Yourself
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Music Time Translation Understand

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

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

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