"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is THE BEST."
— Frank Zappa

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
— Frank Zappa (Real Frank Zappa Book)

"A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it is not open."
— Frank Zappa

"If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it."
— Frank Zappa

"Music is the only religion that delivers the goods."
— Frank Zappa

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."
— Frank Zappa

"I never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird."
— Frank Zappa

"I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy."
— Frank Zappa

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."
— Frank Zappa

"The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively-- because, without this humble appliance, you can't know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a 'box' around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?"
— Frank Zappa

"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."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
— Victor Borge

"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 innumerable relationships."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Reality is not always probable, or likely."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"As infants, our first victory comes in grasping some bit of the world, usually our mother's fingers. Later we discover that the world, and the things of the world, are grasping us, and have been all along."
— Stephen King

"I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Collected Fictions)

"On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe.

I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"... he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Dreamtigers)

"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)"
— Jorge Luis Borges

"God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country."
— Jorge Luis Borges

""Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Collected Fictions)

"“I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted
into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.” "
— Jorge Luis Borges (Seven Nights)

"...you can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well."
— Borges, Jorge Luis

"Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"“Others brag of books they’ve managed to write.. I brag of books I’ve managed to read.” "
— Jorge Luis Borges

"It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature."
— Jorge Luis Borges (Prologue to El otro, el mismo)

"The central problem of novel-writing is causality."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills."
— Jorge Luis Borges (The Book of Imaginary Beings)

"Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me
and treating me badly."
— Jorges luis Borges

""Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.""
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
— Roberto Bolaño

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
— Italo Calvino

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
— Italo Calvino

"“The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.”"
— Italo Calvino

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
— Italo Calvino

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
— Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities)

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."
— Italo Calvino

"Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness."
— Italo Calvino