Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.
What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, 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?
The web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces “every” possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist.
The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said. Looking for metaphors, for example: When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same.
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.
I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.
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.
The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.
Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.
Mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of men...
Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.
To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.
Centuries and centuries of idealism have not failed to influence reality.
Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon.
Time is the thing I am made of. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
Time can’t be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.