We spend our lives waiting for our book and it never comes.

Russel /…/ antar att planeten har blivit skapad för några minuter sedan, >utrustad< med en mänsklighet som >minns< ett illusoriskt förflutet.

…vidi i resti atroci di quanto deliziosamente era stata Beatriz Viterbo, vidi la circolazione del mio oscuro sangue, vidi il meccanismo dell’amore e la modificazione della morte, vidi l’Aleph, da tutti i punti, vidi nell’Aleph la terra, e nella terra di nuovo l’Aleph e nell’Aleph la terra, vidi il mio volto e le mie viscere,...

From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its...

One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that...

The SuicideNot a single star will be left in the night.The night will not be left.I will die and, with me,the weight of the intolerable universe.I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,the continents and faces.I shall erase the accumulated past.I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.Now I am looking on the final sunset.I...

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire...

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one’s slightest distraction.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given...

The truth is that we all live by leaving behind; no doubt we all profoundly know that we are immortal and that sooner or later every man will do all things and know everything.

Casi no soy, pero mis versos ritmanla vida y su esplendor. Yo fui Walt Whitman.

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others.I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite.

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.

But let no one imagine that we were mere ascetics. There is no more complex pleasure than thought, and it was to thought that we delivered ourselves over.

Which one of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?

I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.

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.

I owe my first inkling of the problem of infinity to a large biscuit tin that was a source of vertiginous mystery during my childhood.

It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.

He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.

Before unearthing this letter, I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. I could think of nothing other than a cyclic volume, a circular one. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely.

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.

We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.

It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born.

Sabemos que el pasado, el presente y el porvenir ya están, minucia por minucia, en la profética mente de Dios, en Su eternidad; lo extraño es que los hombres puedan mirar, indefinidamente, hacia atrás pero no hacia adelante.

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he’s playing at several games at once.

I never reread what I’ve written. I’m far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I’ve done.

You have wakened not out of sleep, but into a prior dream, and that dream lies within another, and so on, to infinity, which is the number of grains of sand. The path that you are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.

We have a very precise image – an image at times shameless – of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.

God, in the dream, illumined the animal’s brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified...

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling’s] peers were socialists.

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 convertedinto words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end.

Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.

La amistad une; también el odio sabe juntar.

The image of the Lord has been replaced by a mirror.

The three of them knew it. She was Kafka’s mistress. Kafka had dreamt her. The three of them knew it. He was Kafka’s friend. Kafka had dreamt him. The three of them knew it. The woman said to the friend, Tonight I want you to have me. The three of them knew it. The man...

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,...

EL AMENAZADOEs el amor. Tendré que ocultarme oque huir.Crecen los muros de su cárcel, comoen un sueño atroz. Lahermosa máscara ha cambiado, perocomo siempre es la única.,De qué me servirán mis talismanes:el ejercicio de las letras,la vaga erudición, el aprendizaje delas palabras que usó eláspero Norte para cantar sus maresy sus espadas, la serenaamistad, las...

I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.

Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.

We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts...

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

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

… no se puede medir el tiempo por días, como el dinero por centavos o pesos, porque los pesos son iguales y cada día es distinto y tal vez cada hora.