Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining. Jorge Luis Borges More Quotes by Jorge Luis Borges More Quotes From Jorge Luis Borges We have stopped believing in progress. What progress that is ! Jorge Luis Borges progress science believe In the critics' vocabulary, the work 'precursor' is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemics or rivalry. Jorge Luis Borges rivalry connotation vocabulary It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth. Jorge Luis Borges labyrinth mirrors two The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. Jorge Luis Borges possibility infinite art The universe is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. Jorge Luis Borges gallery infinite numbers 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? Jorge Luis Borges horse bars voice 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. Jorge Luis Borges maturity real writing One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read. Jorge Luis Borges literature A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face. Jorge Luis Borges labyrinth drawing men The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings? Jorge Luis Borges doubt feelings water The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. Jorge Luis Borges phases faces past Had I to give advice to writers (and I do not think they need it, because everyone has to find out things for himself), I would tell them simply this; I would ask them to tamper as little as they can with their own work. I do not think tinkering does any good. The moment comes when one has found out what one can do - when one has found one's natural voice, one's rhythm. Then I do not think that slight emendations should prove useful. Jorge Luis Borges voice writing thinking He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain. Jorge Luis Borges grammar periods made Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius. Jorge Luis Borges genius temptation art I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. Jorge Luis Borges style self art In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects. Jorge Luis Borges causes literature order There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once. Jorge Luis Borges impossible-things merit intellectual This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself. Jorge Luis Borges divinity mask individual I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done. Jorge Luis Borges ashamed done feels As a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight. Jorge Luis Borges letters boys book
