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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

Jorge Luis Borges

The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Father Mirror Universe Visible
I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man’s diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books… If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Disappear Diversity History Man Myself
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Combination Infinite Possible
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
I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist – I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don’t have to solve that problem. It’s up to God, if any.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Identity Memories Problem Solution
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Memories Mirror Museum Shape
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Death Writing
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
Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Happiness Live Love Lover
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
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
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
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Opinion Right Yourself
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
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Blind Darkness Poet
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Fantasy Hard Time Himself Man Opportunity Skills Story
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Doubt Inspirational Intelligence Name
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Fiction Fight Funny Literature Story
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
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Happiness Hold Mystery
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

God Myself Possible Strange Tolerance World
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
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
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creation Fall Fall In Love God Religion
Only in the present do things happen.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Inspirational Moments Present
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
He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

People Poet Prostitute Worst

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

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