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He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

Jorge Luis Borges

I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Beautiful Better Fall In Love Literature Preference Student Teaching
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Doubt Fake Memories Process Reflection School
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Affirmation Earth Errors Mistake
Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but hypotheses may not.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Avoid Interest Obligation Reality
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
I have always come to life after coming to books.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Feeling Life Myself
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Carry Difficult Essential Immortal Myself
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
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Oneself Page Pride Reading Writing
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
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Awake Fantasy Philosophy Science World
Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Animal Time
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
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ease Friendship Minority Myself Time Writing
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Belief Celebration Direct Expression Fight State
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

He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

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He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

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