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Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

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
Future
Precursors
Past
Modifies
Polemics
Writing
Precursor
Work
Modify
Every
Conception
Creates
Writer

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
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Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
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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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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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I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.
Jorge Luis Borges
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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
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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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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We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
Jorge Luis Borges
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A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
Jorge Luis Borges
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Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and Im unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
Jorge Luis Borges
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To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
Jorge Luis Borges