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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.

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
Many
Courses
Theories
Even
Course
Devoted
Work
Literature
Literary
Verified
Life
Reading
Final
Stimuli
Less
Finals
Contradicts
Times
Intention
Ignores
Living
Usually
Stimulus
Nothing
Theory
Intentions

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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I am almost sure to be blotted out by death, but sometimes I think it is not impossible that I may continue to live in some other manner after my physical death . Or, as Hamlet wonders, what dreams will come when we leave this body?
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Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
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Everything touches everything.
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I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
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A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
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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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In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
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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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We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
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I have always come to life after coming to books.
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We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
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My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
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A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
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Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
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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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To be immortal is commonplace except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text he should change it into something else.
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The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
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Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
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Perhaps the apparent favor of the universe is no more than the crocodile grin of a Doberman breathing hard and about to be hungry?
Jorge Luis Borges