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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.

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
Books
Offer
Read
Emotions
Book
Ancient
Commentaries
Writing
Criticism
Hedonistic
Never
Merely
Commentary
Offers
Aesthetic
Reader
Ignore
Emotion
Personally

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso / Bajo la especie de una biblioteca. I have always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text he should change it into something else.
Jorge Luis Borges
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i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive
Jorge Luis Borges
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Poetry springs from something deeper it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We did meet forty years ago. At that time we were both influenced by Whitman and I said, jokingly in part, 'I don't think anything can be done in Spanish, do you?' Neruda agreed, but we decided it was too late for us to write our verse in English. We'd have to make the best of a second-rate literature.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
Jorge Luis Borges
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I can’t talk about my books. I have written them and tried to forget them. I have written once, and readers have read me many times, no? I try to think of what I wrote, it’s very unhealthy to think about the past, the case of elegies is very sad, as much as the case of complaints.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.
Jorge Luis Borges
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To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
Jorge Luis Borges
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When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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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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The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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This web of time--the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore eachother through the centuries--embrace every posibility.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...
Jorge Luis Borges
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Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
Jorge Luis Borges