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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?

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
Ignorance
Imagine
Sure
Death
Anything
Nothing
Even
Date
Economics

More quotes by 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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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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In general, every country has the language it deserves.
Jorge Luis Borges
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What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
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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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
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Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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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My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
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 do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A writer's work is the product of laziness.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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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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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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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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.
Jorge Luis Borges