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When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.

Jorge Luis Borges

I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Body Death Impossible Leave Live Myself Thinking
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
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
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
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
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Perspective Relationship
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Memories Mirror Museum Shape
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
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
It is clear that there is no classification of the Universe that is not arbitrary and full of conjectures. The reason for this is very simple: we do not know what kind of thing the universe is.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Known Reason Simplicity Universe
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
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
I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Color Reflection Rose
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
If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Father Library Life Name
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

When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.

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When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.

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