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
weaving facts possibility
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.
far-away walks
i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive
mother censorship metaphor
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
men letters too-much
In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.
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.