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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
Nothing
Even
Date
Economics
Ignorance
Imagine
Sure
Death
Anything

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
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
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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
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I try to avoid purple patches, fine writing, all that kind of thing... because I think they're a mistake. And then sometimes it comes through and sometimes it doesn't, but that's not up to me. It's up to chance.
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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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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I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?
Jorge Luis Borges
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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
Jorge Luis Borges
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My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
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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While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one
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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I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.
Jorge Luis Borges
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What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
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Many people have thought of me as a thinker, as a philosopher, or even as a mystic. Well the truth is that though I have found reality perplexing enough - in fact, I find it gets more perplexing all the time - I never think of myself as a thinker.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
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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When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
Jorge Luis Borges
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It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
Jorge Luis Borges