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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

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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
May
Shameless
Replace
Precise
Ignorant
Image
Follow
Times
Lost

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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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My father and he had cemented one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
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What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
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I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.
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The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
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The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
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Poetry springs from something deeper it's beyond intelligence.
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Films are even stranger, for what we are seeing are not disguised people but photographs of disguised people, and yet we believe them while the film is being shown.
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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.
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In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.
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Art always opts for the individual, the concrete art is not Platonic.
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Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.
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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.
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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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Canada is so far away it hardly exists.
Jorge Luis Borges
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In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
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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?
Jorge Luis Borges