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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

Jorge Luis Borges

I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Mirror Myself Planet Reflection
When I feel I’m going to write something, then I just am quiet and I try to listen. Then something comes through. And I do what I can in order not to tamper with it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Feeling Listening Myself Order Writing
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
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
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
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
For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Beautiful Feeling Judgement Ourselves Result
The sea is an idiom I cannot decipher.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Literature Metaphor Myself Sea
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Form Heaven Library Myself Paradise Thinking
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
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Writing
Death is just infinity closing in.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Close Death Infinite
Only in the present do things happen.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Inspirational Moments Present
It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Allow Himself History Human Sea
Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Creativity End River
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 man who acquires an encyclopedia does not thereby acquire every line, every paragraph, every page, and every illustration; he acquires the possibility of becoming familiar with one and another of those things.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Himself Knowledge Man Possibility
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Confusion Corruption Infinite Limitation
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Science Time
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

God Kind Myself Purpose Thinking Unknown
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Doubt Inspirational Intelligence Name
I think most people are more important than their opinions.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Important Opinion People Thinking
I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Love Myself Reading Travel Visit Woman Writing
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 mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expectation Himself Love
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Missing Value Yourself
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

Difficult Light Spanish Word Yourself

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.

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