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Only in the present do things happen.

Jorge Luis Borges

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Anxiety Beyond Inspirational Invitation Myself Universe
My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Known Stand Writing
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
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Decoration Flower Garden Plant Self Love Soul Yourself
Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Animal Time
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Awake Fantasy Philosophy Science World
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Opinion Right Yourself
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
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Past
Don’t talk unless you can improve the silence.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Improvement Silence Talk Yourself
Every man should be capable of all ideas.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Capable Ideas Man
When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don’t have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don’t think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Expression Intimate Myself Necessary Possible Simplicity Writing
A writer should have another lifetime to see if he’s appreciated.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Appreciation Life Poet Time 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 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
If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Infinite Point Space Time
There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Human Pain Point Suffering
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
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
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ideas Novel Plane Reality
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
Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Disguise Movie People Photograph Stranger
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Acceptance Experience Immortal World
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

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

Happiness Live Love Lover
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Consume Fire Myself Time

Only in the present do things happen.

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Only in the present do things happen.

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