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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.
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
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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
Longer
Becomes
Confesses
Actors
Observes
Men
Ceases
Performed
Witness
Cease
Actor
More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.
Jorge Luis Borges
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
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
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.
Jorge Luis Borges
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.
Jorge Luis Borges
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
Jorge Luis Borges
I have always come to life after coming to books.
Jorge Luis Borges
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Jorge Luis Borges
I am interested in the past. Perhaps one of the reasons is we cannot make, cannot change the past. I mean you can hardly unmake the present. But the past after all is merely to say a memory, a dream. You know my own past seems continually changed when I am remembering it, or reading things that are interesting to me.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
