Jorge Luis Borges Quotes: 18

• I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

• Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

• Life itself is a quotation.

• I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

• I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.

• Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

• You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

• A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. 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.

  Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Interviews by Roberto Alifano 1981-1983

• A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

• When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

• 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.

  Seven Nights

• To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

• Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.

  Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

• Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

  This Craft of Verse

• I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

  Seven Nights

• He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

  Dreamtigers

• He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.

  The Aleph and Other Stories

• Paradise will be a kind of library