153 quotes
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Only one thing is more admirable than the admirable reply of the Saxon king: that an Icelander, a man of the lineage of the vanquished, has perpetuated the reply.
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.
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.
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942)
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.
Ficciones (1944)
Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could — a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one.
Autobiographical Notes (1970)
"Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions," murmmured Lönnrot.
"Like Christianity," the editor put in.
Ficciones (1944)
The geometry of Tlön comprises two somewhat different disciplines: the visual and the tactile. The latter corresponds to our own geometry and is subordinated to the first.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
It’s always the same: if someone is against convention his only way of attacking it is by creating another convention, so that when most people are clean-shaven he grows a beard, and when beards are worn he shaves his off. He’s merely changing from one convention to another.
There is a flavor that our time (perhaps surfeited by the clumsy imitations of professional patriots) does not usually perceive without some suspicion: the fundamental flavor of the heroic.
Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.
Even village women and children know that the unicorn is a lucky sign. But this animal does not figure among the barnyard animals, it is not always easy to come across, it does not lend itself to zoological classification.
Book of Imaginary Beings (1957)
One thinker no less brilliant than the heresiarch himself, but in the orthodox tradition, advanced a most daring hypothesis. This felicitous supposition declared that there is only one Individual, and that this indivisible Individual is every one of the separate beings in the universe, and that these beings are the instruments and masks of divinity itself.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
I have committed the worst sin that can be committed. I have not been happy.