Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish-language literature. His best-known books, Ficcionesand El Aleph, published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth24 August 1899
ignorant may shameless
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.
reading thinking should
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
ignorance imagine not-sure
I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?
suffering documentation language
Translations are a partial and precious documentation of the changes the text suffers.
reading hippie writing
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
healing weakness left
From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
book axes isolated
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
life reality probable-cause
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
dream lying sleep
You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.
song art voice
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
writing simple earth
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.
time granted labor
The time for your labor has been granted.
mean writing ease
I do not write for a select minority, which means nothing to me, nor for that adulated platonic entity known as ‘The Masses’. Both abstractions, so dear to the demagogue, I disbelieve in. I write for myself and for my friends, and I write to ease the passing of time.
men heaven action
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.