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Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Jorge Luis Borges

You can’t measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Day Different Measurement Money 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
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Probability Reality
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
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
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Astonishment Myself Wake Up Worst
A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Myself Resource Writing
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
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Improvement Silence Talk Yourself
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
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Writing
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Myself Sleep
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
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ideas Novel Plane Reality
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Memories Mirror Museum Shape
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Conversation Death Forget Man
When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Actor Confession Man Observation Oneself Performance
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Past
A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Appreciation Life Poet Time Writing
Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Literature Patience Power Time
In general, every country has the language it deserves.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Country Deserve Language
To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Arrangement Criticism Practice Quiet
Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Happiness Live Love Lover
I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Afraid Feeling Myself Reading Shame Writing
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expression Finding Mention Rose Word
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

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

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Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

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