There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.

That one individual should awaken in another memories that belong to still a third is an obvious paradox.

A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality.