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I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the vain and superstitious habit of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

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
Hand
Attempting
Repudiate
Books
Zone
Librarians
Sense
Vain
Superstitious
Hands
Meaning
Librarian
Dream
Habit
Chaotic
Find
Whose
Palms
Book
Dreams
Quests
Trying
Lines
Quest
Equating

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When one confesses to an act, one ceases to be an actor in it and becomes its witness, becomes a man that observes and narrates it and no longer the man that performed it.
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Kafka had the sense of guilt. I don't think I have because I don't believe in free will. Because what I have done has been done, well, for me or through me. But I haven't done it really. But I don't believe in free will, I can't feel guilty.
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I have used the philosophers' ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don't think that I'm a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps.
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Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
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You may win your heart's desire, but in the end you're cheated of it by death.
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Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.
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For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.
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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.
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A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.
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What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
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When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
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In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.
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I secretly assumed, as poets do, The duty on me to define the moon.
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Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
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The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.
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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.
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All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
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The execution was set for the 29th of March, at nine in the morning. This delay was due to a desire on the part of the authorities to act slowly and impersonally, in the manner of planets or vegetables.
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We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
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