On February 14, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires urging me to return home immediately; my father was “not at all well.” God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to communicate to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the absoluteness of the adverbial phrase, the temptation to dramatize my grief by feigning a virile stoicism-all this perhaps distracted me from any possibility of real pain.
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.
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 Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.
The taste of the apple... lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way... poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading.
I cannot lament the loss of a love or a friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had.
The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.
Art is fire plus algebra.
Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man.
If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.
I do not know which of us has written this page.
There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.
Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.
El problema no es que mientas. El problema es que te creo.
I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.
The morning sun shone over the bronze blade. There were no more traces of blood left. “Would you believe it Ariadne?” said Theseus “The Minotaur almost didn’t defend itself.
Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.
All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass?
Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen.
That imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced, is perhaps the aesthetic reality.
There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.