A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

— Jorge Luis Borges

A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Irene could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I have no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.

— Jorge Luis Borges

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare

— Jorge Luis Borges

All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.

— Jorge Luis Borges

All theories are legitimate, no matter. What matters is what you do with them.

— Jorge Luis Borges

All things left her, all But one. Her highborn courtliness Accompanied her to the end, Beyond the rapture and its eclipse, In a way like an angel's. Of Elvira The first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile, and also it was the last.

— Jorge Luis Borges

And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger.Oh, incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird.

— Jorge Luis Borges

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperation and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

— Jorge Luis Borges

Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

— Jorge Luis Borges