Miscellaneous quotation

"We are our memory,
we are this chimerical museum of shifting forms,
this heap of broken mirrors."

--Borges, "Cambridge"

Jorge Luis Borges, "June 1968"

On a golden evening,
or in a quietness whose symbol
might be a golden evening,
a man sets up his books
on the waiting shelves,
feeling the parchment and leather and cloth
and the satisfaction given
by the anticipation of a habit
and the establishment of order.
Stevenson and that other Scotsman, Andrew Lang,
will here pick up again, in a magic way,
the leisurely conversation broken off
by oceans and by death,
and Alfonso Reyes surely will be pleased
to share space close to Virgil.
(To arrange a library is to practice,
in a quiet and modest way,
the art of criticism.)
The man, who is blind,
knows that he can no longer read
the handsome volumes he handles
and that they will not help him write
the book which in the end might justify him,
but on this evening that perhaps is golden
he smiles at his strange fate
and feels that special happiness
which comes from things we know and love.

--Jorge Luis Borges, "JUNE 1968"

Miscellaneous quotation

“The secret, I should tell you, is not as valuable as the steps that brought me to it. Those steps have to be taken, not told.”

--Borges, "The Anthropologist"

Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"

…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 whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

--Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science", Collected Fictions (tr. Andrew Hurley)

Jorge Luis Borges, Excerpt from "Labryinths"

"Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader's features known, but the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work -- which is an excellent description of Borges's own art. 'God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.'"
--Borges, Labyrinths