BORGES - WRITING READING LIFE

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” 

 

 

 

 “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

 

 “Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”

 “I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”

 

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

 

“A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

 

“The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.”

 

 “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."

 

 “Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.”

  “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.” 

 

“Life itself is a quotation.” 

 

 

And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning
And company doesn’t mean security.

And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
And presents aren’t promises,

And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head up and your eyes open
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child,

After a while you learn…
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.

With every good-bye you learn.”

 “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

 

 

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

 

 

 “Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.”

 

                                       “Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.”