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

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It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
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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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We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
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I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
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I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.
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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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A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
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Reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but ... hypotheses may not.
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I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.
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When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
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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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I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.
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I hardly know what I'm going to write - an article, a story, a poem in free verse - or in some regular form. I only know that when I have the first sentence. And when the first sentence makes a kind of pattern, then I find out the kind of rhythm I'm looking for.
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I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...
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We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
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Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.
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I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one.
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I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
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The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
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Every man should be capable of all ideas.
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