Selected Non-Fictions

A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

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 think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.

His life, measured in space and time, will take up a mere few lines, which my ignorance will abbreviate further.

We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.

He [Omar Khayyam] is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Koran; for every educated man is a theologian and faith is not a requisite.

The European and the North American consider that a book that has been awarded any kind of prize must be good; the Argentine allows for the possibility that the book might not be bad, despite the prize.

In art nothing is more secondary than the author's intentions.

Science is a finite sphere that grows in infinite space; each new expansion makes it include a larger zone of the unknown, but the unknown is inexhaustable.

Night is pleasing to us because, like memory, it erases idle details. A New Refutation of Time

One of the habits of the mind is the invention of horrible imaginings. - The Total Library

Distance and antiquity (the emphases of space and time) pull on our hearts. If we are already sobered by the thought that men lived two thousand five hundred years ago, how could we not be moved to know that they made verses, were spectators of the world, that they sheltered in light, lasting words something of their ponderous, fleeting life, words that fulfill a long destiny?

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library. - Blindness

Word for word, Galland’s version [of the One Thousand and One Nights] is the worst written, the most fraudulent and the weakest, but it was the most widely read. Readers who grew intimate with it experienced happiness and amazement. Its orientalism, which we now find tame, dazzled the sort of person who inhaled snuff and plotted tragedies in five acts. Twelve exquisite volumes appeared from 1707 to 1717, twelve volumes innumerably read, which passed into many languages, including Hindustani and Arabic. We, mere anachronistic readers of the twentieth century, perceive in these volumes the cloyingly sweet taste of the eighteenth century and not the evanescent oriental aroma that two hundred years ago was their innovation and their glory. No one is to blame for this missed encounter, least of all Galland.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

There is no poet who is the total voice of love, hate, despair. That is, the great verses of humanity have still not been written. This imperfections should raise our hopes.

We touch a sphere, see a heap of dawn colored light, our mouths enjoy a tingling sensation, and we lie to ourselves that those three disparate things are only one thing called an orange.

There is nothing more characteristic of a country than its imaginations. - Prologue to The Tiger Guest, P'u Sung-ling

All things go off, leaving us. Old age is probably the supreme solitude - except that the supreme solitude is death. - Blindness

A book of genius is a book that can be read in a slightly or very different way by each generation. - The Enigma of Shakespeare

When a country has a strong spirit, foreign and exotic influences do not debilitated that spirit, they strengthen it. - German Literature in the Age of Bach

Destiny prefers to repeat forms, and what happened once happens often. - A History of the Tango

Burning books and erecting fortifications are the usual occupations of princes. - The Wall and the Books

Each moment we live exists, not the imaginary combination of these moments. A New Refutation of Time

I swear never to involve myself again [in conversation with Nazi sympathisers], for the time granted to mortals is not infinite and the fruits of these discussions is vain. - Definition of a Germanophile

If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning than the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world. Your favourite books, reader, are like rough drafts of that book without a final reading. - Literary Pleasure

Nouns are abbreviations. Instead of saying cold, sharp, burning, unbreakable, shining, pointy, we utter "dagger"; - Verbiage for Poems

Language is an efficient ordering of the world's enigmatic abundance. Verbiage for Poems

Many futile hours cluster in remembrance around one hour in which there was love. - The Nothingness of Personality

Memory is no more than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way. - The Nothingness of Personality