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.

What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites. The fact that several persons counting the same quantity come to the same result is for the psychologists of Tlön an example of the association of ideas or of memorization.

A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in The White Whale that a man ought to be 'a patriot to heaven,' and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be a cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.

We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.