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

Jorge Luis Borges

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer – to be living a kind of double life.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Life Live Lonely Need Share Writing
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Aesthetic Criticism Personal Reading
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Death Writing
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
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Death Form Fragile Lose World
We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

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

Astonishment Myself Wake Up Worst
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
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Build Philosophy Stone
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
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
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Drawing Face Man Portray
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.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creature Divine Ignorance Immortal Man Myself Terrible
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Creation Fall Fall In Love God Religion
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

Dangerous Darkness Defeat Heart Hungry Lonely Myself
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

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

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

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