"I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government."

"I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech."

"Art is fire plus algebra."

"I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceiver of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite."

"We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors."

"If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast-I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people-perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven-but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination."

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

"And yet, and yet, Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny, is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

"Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest."

"I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is."

"In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects."

"Democracy is an abuse of statistics."

"I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies."

"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."

"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."

"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."

"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."

"The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible."

"So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature."

"The three of them knew it. She was Kafka's mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka's friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man replied: If we sin, Kafka will stop dreaming us. One of them knew it. There was no longer anyone on earth. Kafka said to himself Now the two of them have gone, I'm left alone. I'll stop dreaming myself."

"I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror."

"I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely."

"Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end."

"Of all man's instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination."

"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."

"My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether. They used to exchange books and periodicals; they would beat one another at chess, without saying a word."

"Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists."

"Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction."

"I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end."

"The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror."

"To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract."

"We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away."

"But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over."

"The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps."

"We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes."

"He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite."

"It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death."

"Life itself is a quotation."

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

"I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks."

"All things left her, allBut one. Her highborn courtlinessAccompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of ElviraThe first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last."

"Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic."

"Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing."

"Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not."

"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."

"Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within."

"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

"It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born."

"I think-the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center."

"Let not the rash marble riskgarrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,in many words recallingname, renown, events, birthplace.All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.Let not the marble say what men do not.The essentials of the dead man's life--the trembling hope,the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--will abide forever.Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continuewhen it is the lives of others that will make that happen,as you yourself are the mirror and imageof those who did not live as long as youand others will be (and are) your immortality on earth."