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

Jorge Luis Borges

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
What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Known Myself Person Reach
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Action Deserve Heaven Hell Man Myself
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
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Astonishment Myself Wake Up Worst
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
We accept reality so readily – perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Acceptance Reality Thinking
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Book Experience Fall In Love Thinking
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Dreams Mindset Perspective World
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Age Oneself Poet Poetry
Death is just infinity closing in.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Close Death Infinite
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Existence Fact Poetry Possible Word
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Beautiful Better Fall In Love Literature Preference Student Teaching
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Detail Memories Myself Night Solitude Thinking Walk
Man’s memory shapes Its own Eden within.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

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

Conversation Death Forget Man
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Probability Reality
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Consume Fire Myself River Substance Time
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
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
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Believe Freedom Government Point Reach Time
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
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
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Himself Misunderstanding Reading Thinking
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Form Heaven Library Myself Paradise Thinking
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
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
JORGE LUIS BORGES

Flattery Poster Worth

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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