Borges Quotes

1. "I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds."
Author: Alan Lightman

2. "For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end."
Author: Alberto Manguel

3. "My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden."
Author: August Wilson

4. "Borges spune cu destula dreptate ca Pascal se intereseaza mai putin de Dumnezeu, cît de combaterea celor care-l tagaduiesc. In fond, Pascal avea temperament de polemist. Toata opera lui e un atac mai mult sau mai putin deghizat. (Este si motivul pentru care-mi place atît de mult.)"
Author: Emil Cioran

5. "Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change."
Author: Federico Fellini

6. "You always felt destined for stardom of one kind or another. But the fear that maybe that wasn't true wouldn't leave you alone. That you were no more than the classes you'd taken, the schools you'd attended, the books you'd read, the languages you spoke, your scholarships, your master's thesis on Borges and the English writers, and so on, but nobody unique, with a talent only your own. You were desperate for something that was yours alone. I was yours alone, but that isn't what you meant."
Author: Francisco Goldman

7. "This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?"
Author: Georges Perec

8. "Epitáfio /J.L.Borges (?)Já somos a ausência que seremos.O pó elementar que nos ignora,que foi o rubro Adão, e que é agoratodos os homens, e que não veremos.Já somos sobre a campa as duas datasdo início e do fim. O ataúde,a obscena corrupção que nos desnude,o pranto, e da morte suas bravatas.Não sou o insensato que se aferraao som encantatório do seu nome.Penso com esperança em certo homemque não há de saber o que eu fui na terra.Sob o cruel azul do firmamentoconsolo encontro neste pensamento [277]."
Author: Héctor Abad Faciolince

9. "That you're Borges.' Manny laughed. 'Of course you are, you dumb shit. That's the whole point."
Author: James Sallis

10. "My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke."
Author: John Hodgman

11. "When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

12. "La ya avanzada edad me ha enseñado la resignación de ser Borges"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

13. "Zaman beni sürükleyen bir nehir, ama nehir benim;beni parçalayan bir kaplan, ama kaplan benim;beni tüketen bir ates, ama ates benim;evren, ne yazik ki gerçek;ben, ne yazik ki, borges'im"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

14. "Things duplicate themselves in Tlön; they also tend to grow vague or ‘sketchy,' and to lose detail when they begin to be forgotten. The classic example is the doorway that continued to exist so long as a certain beggar frequented it, but which was lost to sight when he died. Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.' - Jorge Luis Borges, 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

15. "Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

16. "To think, analyze and invent, he [Pierre Menard] also wrote me, "are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfillment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universal is thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be." (Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote, 1939)"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

17. "I have also imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." — Jorge Luis Borges"
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

18. "It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."
Author: Joshua Foer

19. "Borges said there are only four stories to tell: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, the struggle for power and the voyage. All of us writers rewrite these same stories ad infinitum."
Author: Paulo Coelho

20. "According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

21. "One should read Borges more."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

22. "I am told that César Aira writes two books a year, at least, some of which are published by a little Argentinean company named Beatriz Viterbo, after the character in Borges's story "The Aleph." The books of his that I have been able to find were published by Mondadori and and Tusquets Argentina. It's frustrating, because once you've started reading Aira, you don't want to stop. His novels seem to put the theories of Gombrowicz into practice, except, and the difference is fundamental, that Gombrowicz was the abbot of a luxurious imaginary monastery, while Aira is a nun or novice among the Discalced Carmelites of the Word. Sometimes he is reminiscent of Roussel (Roussel on his knees in a bath red with blood), but the only living writer to whom he can be compared is Barcelona's Enrique Vila-Matas. Aira is an eccentric, but he is also one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

23. "Canetti e creio que também Borges, dois homens tão diferentes, disseram que assim como o mar era o símbolo ou o espelho dos ingleses, o bosque era a metáfora onde viviam os alemães."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

24. "Dentro del inmenso océano de la poesía distinguía varias corrientes: maricones, maricas, mariquitas, locas, bujarrones, mariposas, ninfos y filenos. Las dos corrientes mayores, sin embargo, eran la de los maricones y la de los maricas. Walt Whitman, por ejemplo, era un poeta maricón. Pablo Neruda, un poeta marica. William Blake era maricón, sin asomo de duda, y Octavio Paz marica. Borges era fileno, es decir de improviso podía ser maricón y de improviso simplemente asexual. Rubén Darío era una loca, de hecho la reina y el paradigma de las locas. —En nuestra lengua, claro está —aclaró—; en el mundo ancho y ajeno el paradigma sigue siendo Verlaine el Generoso. Una loca, según San Epifanio, estaba más cerca del manicomio florido y de las alucinaciones en carne viva mientras que los maricones y los maricas vagaban sincopadamente de la Ética a la Estética y viceversa."
Author: Roberto Bolaño

25. "List of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness1. Italo Calvino2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths4. The creator of MySpace5. Richard Brautigan6. J.K. Rowling7. The inventor of the children's toy Lite-Brite8. Ann Sexton9. David Foster Wallace10. Gaugin and the Caribbean11. Charles Schulz12. Liam Rector"
Author: Shane Jones

26. "Is there just one single love in a lifetime? Are all our lovers ? from the first to the last, including the most fleeting ? part of that unique love, and is each of them merely an expression of it, a variation, a particular version? In the same way that in literature there is just one true masterpiece to which different writers give a particular form (taking the twentieth century alone: Joyce, who explores everything happening inside his character;s head with microscopic precision; Proust, for whom the present is merely a memory of the past; Kafka, who drifts on the margins between dream and reality; the blind Borges, probably the one I relate to best, etc)."
Author: Sijie Dai

27. "We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don't live in either place the way our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age, and with the age.We know a dozen Arthurs now, all of them true. The Shire changed irrevocably even in Bilbo's lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change."
Author: Ursula K. Le Guin

28. "As Borges has taught us, all the books in the library are contemporary. Great poems are like granaries: they are always ready to enlarge their store."
Author: William H. Gass

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