top of page

Collected Fictions

Jorge Luis Borges

Top 10 Best Quotes

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”

“To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.”

“He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse.”

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”

“Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details.”

“It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.”

“Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.”

“As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.”

“Whoever would undertake some atrocious enterprise should act as if it were already accomplished should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.”

“My memory, sir, is like a garbage disposal.”

Except where otherwise noted, all rights reserved to the author(s) of this book (mentioned above). The content of this page serves solely as promotional material for the aforementioned book. If you enjoyed these quotes, you can support the author(s) by acquiring the full book from Amazon.

Book Keywords:

gospel, time, golgotha, self, mark, borges, future

More Book Quotes:

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

David Sedaris

Work: A Story of Experience

Louisa May Alcott

The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You

Neil Gaiman

bottom of page