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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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Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.
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I don't think we're capable of knowledge, but I like to keep an open mind. So if you ask me whether I believe in an afterlife or not, whether I believe in God or not, I can only answer you that all things are possible. And if all things are possible, heaven and hell and the angels are also possible. They're not to be ruled out.
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Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
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I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
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Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
Jorge Luis Borges
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I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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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From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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
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All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
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Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
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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 ask of any God, of any gods, that if they give immortality, I hope to be granted oblivion also.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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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To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
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.
Jorge Luis Borges