Collected Fictions Quotes

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”
― Jorge Luis Borges , Collected Fictions

“He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“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

“It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“A: Absorbed in our discussion of immortality, we had let night fall without lighting the lamp, and we couldn't see each other's faces. With an offhandedness or gentleness more convincing than passion would have been, Macedonio Fernandez' voice said once more that the soul is immortal. He assured me that the death of the body is altogether insignificant, and that dying has to be the most unimportant thing that can happen to a man. I was playing with Macedonio's pocketknife, opening and closing it. A nearby accordion was infinitely dispatching La Comparsita, that dismaying trifle that so many people like because it's been misrepresented to them as being old... I suggested to Macedonio that we kill ourselves, so we might have our discussion without all that racket.
Z: (mockingly) But I suspect that at the last moment you reconsidered.
A: (now deep in mysticism) Quite frankly, I don't remember whether we committed suicide that night or not.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“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.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow - the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos

“It will be said that the conclusion no doubt preceded its "proofs." But what man can content himself with seeking out proofs for a thing that not even he himself believes in, or whose teaching he cares naught for?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Now that I possess the secret, I could tell it in a hundred different and even contradictory ways. I don't know how to tell you this, but the secret is beautiful, and science, our science, seems mere frivolity to me now... And anyway, the secret is not as important as the paths that led me to it. Each person has to walk those paths himself.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Luego reflexionó que la realidad no suele coincidir con las previsiones; con lógica perversa infirió que prever un detalle circunstancial es impedir que éste suceda.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos

“Tek bir insanın yaptığı, sanki bütün insanlar tarafından yapılmış gibidir. Bu nedenle cennet bahçesindeki söz dinlemezliğin bütün insanlığı kirletmesi haksızlık sayılmaz; gene bu nedenle tek bir Yahudi'nin çarmıha gerilmesinin insanlığı kurtarmaya yetmesi de haksızlık sayılmaz. Belki de Schopenhauer haklıydı; ben başkalarıyım, her insan bütün insanlardır. Shakespeare de neredeyse, zavallı John Vincent Moon'dur.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

“Agustín había escrito que Jesús es la vía recta que nos salva del laberinto circular en que andan los impíos;”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos

“Por indecisión o por negligencia o por otras razones, no me casé, y ahora estoy solo. No me duele la soledad; bastante esfuerzo es tolerarse a uno mismo y a sus manías. Noto que estoy envejeciendo; un síntoma inequívoco es el hecho de que no me interesan o sorprenden las novedades, acaso porque advierto que nada esencialmente nuevo hay en ellas y que no pasan de ser tímidas variaciones”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos

“Hay quienes hablan un idioma con muchas eses, que ha de ser español, puesto que quienes lo hablan son despreciados.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos