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Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

Jorge Luis Borges

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
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Probability Reality
To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we’ll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Immortal Invention Known Man Play Separate Way
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
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Future Science Time
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Man Myself See Soldier
The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Combination Infinite Possible
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Imagination Kind Library Myself Paradise
Death is just infinity closing in.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Close Death Infinite
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
All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Embarrassment Fortune Improvement Ourselves
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Art Happiness Man Memories Music Transformation
We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Image Lost Replacement Shame Time
What a writer wants to do is not what he does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Writing
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Death Writing
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

Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

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Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

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