Dinesh Jayaraman > Dinesh's Quotes

“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.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

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

“Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“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

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.”
― Bertrand Russell

“Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. . . . In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.”
― Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines

“‎No people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on the time.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
― Nikolai V. Gogol

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Fame is a form - perhaps the worst form - of incomprehension.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Fictions/Ficciones

“Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“The critics often invent authors; they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

“He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins

“You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“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.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

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

“What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

“It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.”
― Jorge Luis Borges