"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."

"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."

"I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had."

"There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite."

"One of the schools in Tlön has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, that the past is no more than present memory."

"Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened."

"We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe."

"Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark."

"Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know."

"The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing."

"I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books."

"When a writer dies, he becomes his books."

"I do not know which of us has written this page."

"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."

"All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know."

"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."

"Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."

"Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much."

"I've fixed my feelings into durable wordswhen they could have been spent on tenderness."

"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."

"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."

"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."

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."

"Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone."

"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."

"Life and death have been lacking in my life."

"There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world.Among the books in my library (I have them before me)There are some that I shall never open now.This summer I complete my fiftieth year;Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly."

"I came to abominate my body, I came to sense that two eyes, two hands, two lungs are as monstrous as two faces."

"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."

"How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?"

"If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell."

"There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything."

"Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."

"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

"Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved."

"Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly."

"Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy."

"Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly."

"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left."

"As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I've already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless."

"It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA."

"The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement."

"In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect."

"All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them."

"I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done."

"Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art."

"Patriotism, that least discerning of pas."

"Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread."

"The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb."

"The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody."