I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
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.
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
Heaven and hell seem out of proportion to me: the actions of men do not deserve so much.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Life itself is a quotation.
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.
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.
You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?
I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
There are those who seek the love of a woman to forget her, to not think about her.
When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
What man of us has never felt, walking through the twilight or writing down a date from his past, that he has lost something infinite?
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.
Estoy solo y no hay nadie en el espejo.
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
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.
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive
A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships
He was very religious; he believed that he had a secret pact with God which exempted him from doing good in exchange for prayers and piety.
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Paradise will be a kind of library
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved.
Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.
The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.
Si me quieren buscar, búsquenme en los libros. No los lean, por favor, si no obtienen placer.
It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.
Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe.
He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.
Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
Que el cielo exista, aunque mi lugar sea el infierno.
From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
He measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
The years go by, and I've told the story so many times that I'm not sure anymore whether I actually remember it or whether I just remember the words I tell it with.
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me...
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance, dreamt by another.
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library.
The art of writing is mysterious, the opinions we hold are ephemeral....
Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself
God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.
Let neither tear nor reproach besmirch this declaration of the mastery of God who, with magnificent irony, granted me both the gift of books and the night.
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.
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.
A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.
Mi carne puede tener miedo; yo, no.
Reading . . . is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.
As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.
.....a miracle has the right to impose conditions.
When a writer dies, he becomes his books.
All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare
Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you.
