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On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.

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
Water
Floor
Doe
Stone
Years
Bars
Men
Sentences
Immobile
Object
Polished
Stones
Reduced
Objects
Hanging
Generations
Sentence

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.
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.
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
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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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
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Art always opts for the individual, the concrete art is not Platonic.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
Jorge Luis Borges
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To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
Jorge Luis Borges
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Everything touches everything.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Poetry springs from something deeper it's beyond intelligence.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The web of time - the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries - embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
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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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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A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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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