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My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

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
Tell
Quandary
Writing
Intruder
Really
Prose
Attempt
Poetry
Writer
Friends
Write

More quotes by Jorge Luis Borges

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I suppose identity depends on memory. And if my memory is blotted out, then I wonder if I exist - I mean, if I am the same person. Of course, I don't have to solve that problem. It's up to God, if any.
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I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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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His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
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In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes. You have used up the years and they have used up you, and still, and still, you have not written the poem.
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The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
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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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The mathematical sciences wield their particular language made of digits and signs, no less subtle than any other.
Jorge Luis Borges
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The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
Jorge Luis Borges
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In general, every country has the language it deserves.
Jorge Luis Borges
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We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
Jorge Luis Borges
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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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It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.
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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 have tried (I am not sure how successfully) to write plain tales. I dare not say they are simple there is not a simple page, a simple word, on earth -\-\ for all pages, all words, predicate the universe, whose most notorious attribute is its complexity.
Jorge Luis Borges
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All literature, is, finally autobiographical.
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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May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
Jorge Luis Borges
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Time, which despoils castles, enriches verses.
Jorge Luis Borges