A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger / of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, / with defeat. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Two English Poems,” A Universal History of Infamy. Publishers Editorial Tor (1935) & Emecé (1954), Published in English (1972)
I am this groping intensity that is a soul. — Jorge Luis Borges, “My Whole Life,” Selected Poems 1923-1967 (Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1972)
Where San Juan and Chacabuco intersect I saw the blues houses, the houses that wear the color of adventure. They were like banners and deep as the dawn that frees the outlying quarters. Some are daybreak color, and some are dawn color: their cool readiance is a passion before the oblique face of any drab,… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past. — Jorge Luis Borges
One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I dreamed that I woke up and there were two grains of sand. Again I slept; I dreamed that now there… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite? ― Jorge Luis Borges
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. — Jorge Luis Borges, from “Two English Poems,” trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Selected Poems: 1923-1967 (Delta, 1972)
In Praise of Darkness Old age (the name that others give it) can be the time of our greatest bliss. The animal has died or almost died. The man and his spirit remain. I live among vague, luminous shapes that are not darkness yet. Buenos Aires, whose edges disintegrated into the endless plain, has gone… Continue reading Jorge Luis Borges
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music. — Jorge Luis Borges
The Vale of Soul-Making 