Labyrinths Quotes

“Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“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, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions

“The poet Marianne Moore famously wrote of 'real toads in imaginary gardens,' and the labyrinth offers us the possibility of being real creatures in symbolic space...In such spaces as the labyrinth we cross over [between real and imaginary spaces]; we are really travelling, even if the destination is only symbolic.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“What’s not to love? I made friends with a pretty girl and now we get to plan a castle break in. This beats the day to day kill, eat and survive.”
― Emilyann Girdner, The Labyrinth Wall

“I'm looking for the labyrinth. The form that Dedalus gave me to the most disturbing question: How much of us is thought, reason, intellect... and how much delirium, hallucination, madness... and how much is a monster. The failure of every plan. A path with no way out.”
― Manuele Fior, Red Ultramarine

“what think you of that, Nick, since you allwaies have your Head stuck in old Books? And I said nothing, for who can speak of the Mazes of the Serpent to those who are not lost in them?”
― Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

“...to no one did it occur the book and the maze were one and the same thing.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

“…Just walking one short path could make you feel hopeful, frustrated, bored, excited, or even nothing at all. And that this could change from one step to the next. You’re aware that you want to reach the center, and also aware that the labyrinth keeps taking you away from it. Just as you seem to be getting close, you turn and end up walking almost around its outer limits.... You love the labyrinth and you hate it at different moments, but you never feel like you’ve conquered it, because that would be ridiculous.... This is a path that is determined for you in advance, but no one can tell you what to think while you’re walking it. It’s not like a maze, you can’t get lost. No one’s playing any tricks on you. There aren’t any monsters lurking around any corners. You can see the end and yet, you walk calmly towards it, following perhaps the least logical route (in mathematical terms at least). Perhaps the labyrinth tells us why we don’t simply read the last pages of books. Why we don’t hurry through life looking for outcomes all the time, however many times we’re told that we should, and that we should be overtaking people and overcoming things as we go. The labyrinth doesn’t tell us how to live. It shows us how we do live.”
― Scarlett Thomas, Our Tragic Universe

“In my effort to fathom my mother, to see things from her per-spective, to accommodate her, to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did and to predict what she may or may not do next, I turned into a maze, a labyrinth of pathways that zigzag underground and surface in strange places, hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own. Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist.  Because that ’s what novelists are  –  labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.”
― Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me