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Quotes by Argentinian Authors
"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."
"Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much."
"I do not know which of us has written this page."
"Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark."
"Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened."
"Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written, I'd rather boast about the ones I've read."
"From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me."
"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries."
"There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her."
"I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity."
"If we think of the novel and the epic...The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character."
"The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information."
"There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations."
"I cannot combine some charactersdhcmrlchtdjwhich the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology."
"Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process."
"I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise."
"What you really value is what you miss not what you have."
"The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds."
"The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in "Olalla" when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand."
"The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about. Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; "tout aboutit en un livre, everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different."
"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."
"I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood."
"Paradise will be a kind of library."
"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."
"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."
"Man's memory shapesIts own Eden within."
"Useless to tell myself that a dreamand the memory of yesterday are the same thing."
"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."
"We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes."
"The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps."
"The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror."
"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."
"Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction."
"Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists."
"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 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."
"I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror."
"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."
"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."
"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Day and night, their frail and crippled ships defy the tempest."
"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."
"We are our memory,we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes,that pile of broken mirrors."
"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."
"I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech."
"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."
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