Dormir, según se sabe, es el mas secreto de nuestros actos. Le dedicamos una tercera parte de nuestra vida y no lo comprendemos. Para algunos no es otra cosa que el eclipse de nuestra vigilia;...

Danten kommentaattori Tomaso Casini muistuttaa tässä yhteydessä toscanalaisesta legendasta, jonka mukaan Herra rankaisi Kainia vangitsemalla tämän kuuhun ja määräten tämän kantamaan piikkistä risukimppua aina päivien loppuun saakka.

Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of...

One day or one night—between my days and nights, what difference can there be?—I dreamed that there was a grain of sand on the floor of my cell. Unconcerned, I went back to sleep; I...

Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic...

Puis il réfléchit: la réalité ne coïncide habituellement pas avec les prévisions; avec une logique perverse, il en déduisit que prévoir un détail circonstanciel, c’est empêcher que celui-ci se réalise. Fidèle à cette faible magie,...

En av lärorna på Tlön går så långt att den förnekar tiden: den tänker sig att nuet är oändligt, att framtiden inte är verklig annat än som en förväntan i nuet, att det förflutna inte...

Ogni linguaggio è un alfabeto di simboli il cui uso presuppone un passato che gli interlocutori condividono; come trasmettere agli altri l’infinito Aleph, che la mia timorosa memoria a stento abbraccia?

Ferrari: How odd, Borges, it seems that we are talking constantly through memory. Sometimes, our conversations remind me of a dialogue between two memories.Borges: In fact, that’s what it is. If we are something, we...

The metaphysicians of Tlön are not looking for truth, nor even for an approximation of it; they are after a kind of amazement.

There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.

All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare

Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

From the twilight of day till the twilight of evening, a leopard, in the last years of the thirteenth century, would see some wooden planks, some vertical iron bars, men and women who changed, a...

Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.

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...

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...

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...

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...