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.
The present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.
There is a labyrinth which is a straight line.
The exchange of thoughts is a condition necessary for all love, all friendship and all real dialogue. Two men who can speak together can enrich and broaden themselves indefinitely.
Ts’ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.
I am this groping intensity that is a soul.
There is a Talmudic legend about three men who go in search of God. One became insane, the other died, and the third met himself.