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 BORGESThe future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
More Jorge Luis Borges Quotes
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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.
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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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The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
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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.
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How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
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Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
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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.
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The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.
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Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
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I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t expect to arrive.
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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.
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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.
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The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
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The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
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I have always come to life after coming to books.
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Everything touches everything.
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Death is just infinity closing in.
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One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.
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A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
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Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
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I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
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I would rather like to think of God as being a kind of adventurer – even as Wells thought about him – or perhaps as something within us making for some unknown purpose.
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The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
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If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.
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In my next life I will try to commit more errors.
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I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
JORGE LUIS BORGES