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I try to avoid purple patches, fine writing, all that kind of thing... because I think they're a mistake. And then sometimes it comes through and sometimes it doesn't, but that's not up to me. It's up to chance.
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
Doesn
Sometimes
Patches
Writing
Purple
Thing
Avoid
Trying
Fine
Kind
Mistake
Think
Chance
Thinking
Comes
More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges
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
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
Kafka had the sense of guilt. I don't think I have because I don't believe in free will. Because what I have done has been done, well, for me or through me. But I haven't done it really. But I don't believe in free will, I can't feel guilty.
Jorge Luis Borges
I have no personal system of philosophy. I never attempt to do that. I am merely a man of letters.
Jorge Luis Borges
We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is !
Jorge Luis Borges
That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
Jorge Luis Borges
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
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
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
Jorge Luis Borges
The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.
Jorge Luis Borges
The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
You don't have to try to be contemporary. You are already contemporary. What one has in mythology is being evolved all the time. Personally, I think I can do with Greek and Old Norse mythology. For example, I don't think I stand in need of planes or of railways or of cars.
Jorge Luis Borges
When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
Jorge Luis Borges
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
Jorge Luis Borges
If a writer disbelieves what he is writing, then he can hardly expect his reader to believe it.
Jorge Luis Borges
My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
Jorge Luis Borges
My advanced age has taught me the resignation of being Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges
I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
Jorge Luis Borges