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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.

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
Kind
Makes
Hardly
Verse
Form
Sentences
Article
Stories
Rhythm
Verses
Find
Patterns
Articles
Firsts
Looking
Pattern
First
Story
Regular
Writing
Free
Sentence
Going
Write
Poem

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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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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Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
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I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal.
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Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
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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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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 believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
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All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
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We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
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The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
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What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
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If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
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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.
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If I write a fantastic story, I'm not writing something willful. On the contrary, I am writing something that stands for my feelings, or for my thoughts. So that, in a sense, a fantastic story is as real and perhaps more real than a mere circumstantial story. Because after all, circumstances come and go, and symbols remain.
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I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.
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On the floor, and hanging on to the bar, squatted an old man, immobile as an object. His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
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The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
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The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms
Jorge Luis Borges
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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.
Jorge Luis Borges