Dawn > Dawn's Quotes

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“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]”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“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.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.”
― Borges, Jorge Luis

“Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Image is sorcery.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Paradise will be a kind of library”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“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.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse

“A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Emma dropped the letter. The first thing she felt was a sinking in her stomach and a trembling in her knees; then, a sense of blind guilt, of unreality, of cold, of fear; then, a desire for this day to be past. Then immediately she realized that such a wish was pointless, for her father's death was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening, endlessly, forever after.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“A miracle has the right to impose conditions.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory

“My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions