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In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
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
Written
Whitman
Eyes
Wonderfully
Eye
Oceans
Stills
Poem
Used
Vain
Still
Ocean
Years
Sun
Seen
Squandered
More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
Jorge Luis Borges
Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.
Jorge Luis Borges
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Jorge Luis Borges
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice in murder, courage in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.
Jorge Luis Borges
I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
Jorge Luis Borges
My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
Jorge Luis Borges
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
Jorge Luis Borges