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 wordsโor rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbolsโspring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
Jorge Luis BorgesIt may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Jorge Luis BorgesThen I reflect that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.
Jorge Luis BorgesThe word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
Jorge Luis BorgesI know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.
Jorge Luis BorgesThis 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 BorgesA man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.
Jorge Luis Borges