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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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I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.
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Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.
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My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.
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I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
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You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.
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Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
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The word happiness exists in every language it is plausible the thing itself exists.
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You don't have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don't think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.
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Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
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I don't think we're capable of knowledge, but I like to keep an open mind. So if you ask me whether I believe in an afterlife or not, whether I believe in God or not, I can only answer you that all things are possible. And if all things are possible, heaven and hell and the angels are also possible. They're not to be ruled out.
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The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
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Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I know that when I think of myself as being utterly worn out, when I think that somehow I have nothing more to write, then something is happening within me. And, in due course, it bubbles up it comes to the surface, and then I do my best to listen. But there's nothing mystical about all this. I suppose all writers do the same.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
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I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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 converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
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Every man should be capable of all ideas.
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It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death .
Jorge Luis Borges
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I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges