The Library of Babel

"It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a commentary upon them. A more reasonable, inept, and lazy man, I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books."

“Three thousand men do battle—God the indivisible against the gods.”

"Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.”

“He understood that the task of molding the incoherent and dizzying stuff that dreams are made of is the most difficult work a man can undertake.”

"Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, jail. Look: the index finger of my right hand is missing. Look again: through this rent in my cape you can see a ruddy tattoo on my belly."

"He believed that “great literature” is the commonest thing in the world, and that there is hardly a conversation in the streets that did not attain those heights. Quain would often argue that readers were an extinct species.”

"I declare that the Library is endless.”

“I am a coward. I can say that, now that I have carried out a plan whose dangerousness and daring no man will deny. I know that it was a terrible thing to do. I did not do it for Germany. What do I care for a barbaric country that had forced me to the ignominy of spying. No—I did it because I sensed that the Leader looked down on the people of my race—the countless ancestors whose blood flows through my veins. I wanted to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies."

"When he fell, he’d been knocked unconscious; when he came to again, the present was so rich, so clear, that it was almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memories. Now his perception and his memory were perfect.”

"Do you not see set upon my face the mark of iniquity ? Now, despise me."

"The idea that history might have copied history is mind-boggling enough; that history should copy literature is inconceivable.”

“The young man wanted to talk about murder, [the detective] preferred to talk about the many names of God.”

“This play observed the unities of time, place, and action.”

”Thus did Nils Runeberg explain the enigma that is Judas.”

“From the other room there came the strumming of a guitar, like some inconsequential labyrinth, infinitely tangling and untangling.”

“Lacking a sacred book to unite them as the Scriptures unite Israel, lacking a common memory, lacking a common language, scattered across the face of the earth, diverse in color there is but one thing –the Secret—that unites them.”

"They went outside, and while there was no hope, there was no fear, either. He felt that on that first night in the hospital, when they’d stuck that needle in him, dying in a knife fight under the open sky, grappling with his adversary, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a fiesta.”