The Atlas

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

“My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.”

“To deny temporal succession, to deny the self, to deny the astronomical universe, are measures of apparent despair and of secret consolation. Our destiny (in contrast to Swedenborg's hell and the hell of Tibetan mythology) is not frightful because it is unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and ironbound. Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

“Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.”

“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”

“Boast of Quietness Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity. My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls. Time is living me. More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. My name is someone and anyone. I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.”

“Life itself is a quotation.”

“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.”

“Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.”

“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.”

“I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”

“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.”

“Paradise will be a kind of library”

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

“The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.”

“I prayed aloud, less to plead for divine favor than to intimidate the tribe with articulate speech.”

“Democracy is an abuse of statistics.”

“A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”

“One concept corrupts and confuses the others. I am not speaking of the Evil whose limited sphere is ethics; I am speaking of the infinite.”

“The flattery of posterity is not worth much more than contemporary flattery, which is worth nothing.”

“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 must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

“There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.”

“Emma dropped the paper. Her first impression was of a weak feeling in her stomach and in her knees; then of blind guilt, of unreality, of coldness, of fear; then she wished that it were already the next day. Immediately afterwards she realized that that wish was futile because the death of her father was the only thing that had happened in the world, and it would go on happening endlessly.”

“Life and death have been lacking in my life.”

“There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.”

“To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.”

“The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

“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 are to take is endless, and you will die before you have truly awakened.”

“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

“Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.”

“El concepto de arte comprometido es una ingenuidad porque nadie sabe del todo lo que ejecuta. (The notion of art as a compromise is a simplification, for no one knows entirely what they are doing.)”

“In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.”

“Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.”

“The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody.”

“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.”

“As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.”

“Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.”

“The original is unfaithful to the translation.”

“Let not the rash marble risk garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence, in many words recalling name, renown, events, birthplace. All those glass jewels are best left in the dark. Let not the marble say what men do not. The essentials of the dead man's life-- the trembling hope, the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight-- will abide forever. Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue when it is the lives of others that will make that happen, as you yourself are the mirror and image of those who did not live as long as you and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.”

“The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.”

“Nothing is built on stone; All is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”

“I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.”

“The central problem of novel-writing is causality.”

“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

“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.”

“Reality is not always probable, or likely.”

“Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.”

“How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?”