I do not know which of us has written this page.

— Jorge Luis Borges

If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.

— Jorge Luis Borges

If we think of the novel and the epic... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

— Jorge Luis Borges

If you sell, say, two thousand copies, it is the same thing as if you had sold nothing at all because two thousand is too vast—I mean, for the imagination to grasp. While thirty-seven people—perhaps thirty-seven are too many, perhaps seventeen would have been better or even seven—but still thirty-seven are still within the scope of one's imagination.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I imagined a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes, a twisting, turning, ever-widening labyrinth that contained both past and future and somehow implied the stars. Absorbed in those illusory imaginings, I forgot that I was a pursued man; I felt myself, for an indefinite while, the abstract perceived of the world. The vague, living countryside, the moon, the remains of the day did their work in me; so did the gently downward road, which forestalled all possibility of weariness. The evening was near, yet infinite.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror

— Jorge Luis Borges