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What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?

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
Fragile
Lose
Loses
Dies
Form
World
Pathetic
Mortality

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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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.
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What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
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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.
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Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
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Lully's machine, Mill's fear and Lasswitz's chaotic library can be the subject of jokes, but they exaggerate a propensity which is common: making metaphysics and the arts into a kind of play with combinations.
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I don't think esthetic schools are important. What is important is the use that is made of them, or whatever the individual writer does.
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To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
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Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing my grave will be the fathomless air my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.
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His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
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If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
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Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
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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.
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Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
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I don't think I can really believe in doomsday I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality.
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In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.
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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I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.
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The art of writing is mysterious the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.
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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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The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Jorge Luis Borges