Nabila Tabassum Chowdhury > Recent Status Updates

"“I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting.”"

"I sensed that the world was a labyrinth, from which it was impossible to flee, for all paths, whether they seemed to lead north or south, actually led to Rome,"

"“It's possible, but not interesting,” Lönnrot answered. “You will reply that reality hasn't the slightest need to be of interest. And I'll answer you that reality may avoid the obligation to be interesting, but that hypotheses may not."

"It is true that Erik Lönnrot did not succeed in preventing the last crime, but it is indisputable that he foresaw it."

"Kilpatrick, carried away by the minutely scrupulous destiny which redeemed and condemned him, more than once enriched the text (Nolan's text) with words and deeds of his own improvisation."

"That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable. . . ."

"These parallels (and others) in the history of Caesar and the history of an Irish conspirator induce Ryan to assume a secret pattern in time, a drawing in which the lines repeat themselves."

"Borges, I have confessed this to you, a stranger. Your contempt will not wound me as much."

"My reasonable friend was selling me reasonably. I heard him requesting certain guarantees of personal security."

"In order to show that his being a physical coward made no difference to him, he increased his intellectual arrogance."

"Perhaps Schopenhauer is right: I am all others, any man is all men, Shakespeare is in some way the wretched John Vincent Moon.""

"I blushed for this fearful man, as if I, and not Vincent Moon, were the coward. What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it."

"The new comrade did not argue: he passed judgment with obvious disdain and a certain fury."

"To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract."

"The two projects I have indicated (an infinite vocabulary for the natural series of numbers, and a usable mental catalogue of all the images of memory) are lacking in sense, but they reveal a certain stammering greatness. They allow us to make out dimly, or to infer, the dizzying world of Funes."

"Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it."

"The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything."

"He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal."

"A little later he realized that he was crippled. This fact scarcely interested him. He reasoned (or felt) that immobility was a minimum price to pay. And now, his perception and his memory were infallible."

"For nineteen years, he said, he had lived like a person in a dream: he looked without seeing, heard without hearing, forgot everything— almost everything. On falling from the horse, he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories."

"With evident good faith Funes marveled that such things should be considered marvelous."

"Littérateur, slicker, Buenos Airean: Funes did not use these insulting phrases, but I am sufficiently aware that for him I represented these unfortunate categories."

"Apart from one character— Recabarren— whose immobility and passivity serve as a contrasting background, nothing or almost nothing in the brief course of the last- named is an invention of mine; everything in it is implicit in a famous book, and I have merely been the first to reveal, or at least to declare it."

"The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts'ui Pên conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times."

"In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pên, he chooses— simultaneously— all of them."

"“Before I discovered this letter, I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely."

"No one realized that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same."

"I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind."

"I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars."

"I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, that soon only soldiers and bandits will be left."