Great Throughts Treasury

"After a while, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and chaining a soul and you learn that love does not mean leaning and company does not mean security and one begins to learn. That kisses are not contracts and gifts They are not promises and you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes open and you learn to build all your roads on today, because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans... and futures have a way of fall in the middle. And after a while you learn that if too, to the sunshine burns. So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers. And you learn that you really can endure, that you really are strong, that one really worth, and you learn and learn... and you learn every day."

"After a while you learn the subtle difference between keeping the hand and chained to a soul."

"All fiction is a sham; what matters is the feeling that has been dreamed sincerely."

"All literature, is, finally autobiographical."

"Ah,' said the journalist, 'so the entire thing is your own invention. I thought it was true because you gave the name of the street.' I did not dare tell him that the naming of streets is not much of a feat."

"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?"

"All men masters of an intact and secret treasure felt. There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope."

"All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare."

"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."

"All writing is dreaming"

"All resemble the image that others have of us."

"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."

"Among the books in my library are books that I'll never opened. This summer I'll be fifty years old... death does rob me endlessly."

"Although I'm very lazy when it comes to writing, I'm not that lazy when it comes to thinking. I like to develop the plan of a short story, then cut it as short as possible, try to evolve all the necessary details. I know far more about the characters than what actually comes out of the writing."

"All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them."

"Almost'm not, but my verses punctuate life and splendor. I was Walt Whitman."

"An attribute of the infernal is unreality, an attribute that seems to mitigate its terrors and which aggravates them perhaps."

"And I do not understand how time passes I, who am time and blood and agony."

"An act is less than all the hours of a man."

"And I believe there was a rabbi who wrote that the Holy Scriptures were specifically destined, predestined, for each of its readers. That is, it has a different meaning if any of you read it or if I read it, or if it is read by men in the future or in the past."

"And look forward to death, but died without ever complaining."

"And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger. Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird."

"And then, as now, the world was cruel; just as it could travel through the heart, but the wretches, who all get used."

"Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process."

"Another Celtic legend tells of the duel of two famous bards. One, accompanying himself on the harp, sang from the coming day to the coming of twilight. Then, when the stars or the moon came out, the first bard handed the harp to the second, who laid the instrument aside and rose to his feet. The first singer admitted defeat."

"And yet, and yet... Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges."

"Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself."

"Any destination, long and complicated it is, actually consists of a single moment: the moment when the man knows who he is forever"

"Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is."

"Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment ? the moment when a man knows forever more who he is."

"Application, resignation, and chance had gone into the writing; I saw, however, that Daneri's real work lay not in the poetry but in his invention of reasons why the poetry should be admired. Of course, this second phase of his effort modified the writing in his eyes, though not in the eyes of others."

"Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining."

"Ars Poetica: To gaze at the river made of time and water and recall that time itself is another river, to know we cease to be, just like the river, and that our faces pass away, just like the water. To feel that waking is another sleep that dreams it does not sleep and that death, which our flesh dreads, is that very death of every night, which we call sleep. To see in the day or in the year a symbol of mankind's days and of his years, to transform the outrage of the years into a music, a rumor and a symbol, to see in death a sleep, and in the sunset a sad gold, of such is poetry immortal and a pauper. For poetry returns like the dawn and the sunset. At times in the afternoons a face looks at us from the depths of a mirror; art must be like that mirror that reveals to us this face of ours."

"Are eying who is a friend of Almotasim a container that does not rebut the fallacies of the other, not to be right in a triumphal way ."

"Art Happens every time we read a poem."

"Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic."

"Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we're writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important."

"As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight."

"Art is fire plus algebra."

"As a kid, I used to marvel that the letters of a closed volume not mix and lost in the course of the night."

"As an instrument of philosophical research, thinking machine is absurd. It would not be, however, as a literary and poetic instrument."

"As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words."

"As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves ? and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity ? are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans."

"At first cautiously, later indifferently, at last desperately, I wandered up the stairs and along the pavement of the inextricable palace. (Afterwards I learned that the width and height of the steps were not constant, a fact which made me understand the singular fatigue they produced). 'This palace is a fabrication of the gods,' I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: ' The gods who built it have died.' I noted its peculiarities and said: 'The gods who built it were mad.' I said it, I know, with an incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with more intellectual horror than palpable fear... 'This City' (I thought) 'is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars."

"As to my writing short pieces, there are two reasons I can give you. The first is my invincible laziness. The second is that I've always been fond of short stories, and it always took me some trouble to get through a novel."

"As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that line does me no good, because, as I?ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless."

"At my age, one should be aware of one's limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I thought of literature as a game of skillful and surprising variations; now that I have found my own voice, I feel that tinkering and tampering neither greatly improve nor greatly spoil my drafts. This, of course, is a sin against one of the main tendencies of letters in this century--the vanity of overwriting--... I suppose my best work is over. This gives me a certain quiet satisfaction and ease. And yet I do not feel I have written myself out. In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after. As to failure or fame, they are quite irrelevant and I never bother about them. What I'm out for now is peace, the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship, and, though it may be too ambitious, a sense of loving and of being loved."

"At that time I was looking Insert, slums and misery; now looking morning?s center and serenity."

"At peak times the conjecture that the existence of Man is a constant and invariable amount can sadden or irritate; once that decline (like this) is the promise that no disgrace, no calamity or any dictator can impoverish us."

"At the beginning of their careers many writers have a need to overwrite. They choose carefully turned-out phrases; they want to impress their readers with their large vocabularies. By the excesses of their language, these young men and women try to hide their sense of inexperience. With maturity the writer becomes more secure in his ideas. He finds his real tone and develops a simple and effective style."