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To be immortal is commonplace except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Jorge Luis Borges

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Jorge Luis Borges
Age: 86 †
Born: 1899
Born: August 24
Died: 1986
Died: March 26
Librarian
Literary Critic
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Buenos Ayres
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges
Chorche Louis Borches
Jorge Luis Borges Acevedo
Horhe Luis Borhes
J. L. Borges
H. Bustos Domecq
Khorkhe Luyis Borkhes
Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo
Men
Commonplace
Immortal
Ignorant
Creatures
Except
Terrible
Divine
Incomprehensible
Death
Corny

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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
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On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
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I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.
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I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.
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Personally, I am a hedonistic reader I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
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I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?
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Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
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The word happiness exists in every language it is plausible the thing itself exists.
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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.
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When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
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If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
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Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.
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In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
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The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.
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I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.
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There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.
Jorge Luis Borges