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...

. . . 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.

There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There’s a mirror that’s seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I...

The story of two dreams is a coincidence, a line drawn by chance, like the shapes of lions or horses that are sometimes formed by clouds.

Man’s memory shapesIts own Eden within

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen’s house) there was an enormous cat...

Paradise will be a kind of library