In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.

I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

I might accept immortality, if I had to do it. But I would prefer - if there is any afterlife - to know nothing whatever about Borges, about his experiences in this world.

Time is the substance of which we are made

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment.