Quote

Unlike the novel, a short story may be, for all purposes, essential.

Jorge Luis Borges

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Stories
Purposes
May
Unlike
Essential
Essentials
Short
Novel
Story
Purpose

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

Image
All writing is dreaming
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
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.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
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
Image
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
A writer should have another lifetime to see if he's appreciated.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
Life and death have been lacking in my life.
Jorge Luis Borges
Image
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
Image
Time broadens the scope of verses and I know of some which, like music, are everything for all men.
Jorge Luis Borges