James > James's Quotes

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“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

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

“What man 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, Dreamtigers

“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

“The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Brodie's Report

“A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

“I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.”
― Jorge Luis Borges

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.”
― Jean Lescure

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”
― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?”
― Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces