Quotes from The Garden of Forking Paths

“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts'ui Pen, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times which start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times. That is the cause of the contradictions in the novel.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“Diferentemente de Newton e de Schopenhauer, seu antepassado não acretitava num tempo uniforme, absoluto. Acreditava em infinitas séries de tempos, numa rede crescente e vertiginosa de tempos que se aproximam, se bifurcam, se cortam ou que secularmente se ignoram, abrange todas as possibilidades. Não existimos na maioria desses tempos; nalguns existe o senhor e não eu. Noutros, eu, não o senhor; noutros, os dois. Neste, que um acaso favorável me surpreende, o senhor chegou a minha casa; noutro, o senhor, ao atravessar o jardim, encontrou-me morto; noutro, digo estas mesmas palavras, mas sou um erro, um fantasma.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical; but the second is almost infinitely richer.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“I kept asking myself how a book could be infinite. I could not imagine any other than a cyclic volume, circular. A volume whose last page would be the same as the first and so have the possibility of continuing indefinitely.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“Lost in these imaginary illusions I forgot my destiny – that of the hunted.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“I carried out my plan because I felt The Chief had some fear of those of my race, of those uncountable forebears whose culmination lies in me. I wished to prove to him that a yellow man could save his armies.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“Tek bir insanın yaptığı, sanki bütün insanlar tarafından yapılmış gibidir. Bu nedenle cennet bahçesindeki söz dinlemezliğin bütün insanlığı kirletmesi haksızlık sayılmaz; gene bu nedenle tek bir Yahudi'nin çarmıha gerilmesinin insanlığı kurtarmaya yetmesi de haksızlık sayılmaz. Belki de Schopenhauer haklıydı; ben başkalarıyım, her insan bütün insanlardır. Shakespeare de neredeyse, zavallı John Vincent Moon'dur.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“On üçüncü yüzyılın son yıllarında yaşayan bir leopar, sabahın şafağından akşamın alacakaranlığına kadar birkaç kalas, birkaç demir parmaklık, durmadan değişen erkek ve kadın yüzleri, bir duvar ve belki de kuru yapraklarla dolu taş bir yalak gördü. Sevgiyi ve yırtıcılığı, avını parçalamanın harlı zevkini, geyik kokuları getiren rüzgârı özledi­ğini bilemedi, bilemezdi. Gene de içinde bir şeyler tıkandı, bir şeyler isyan etti ve Tanrı ona rüyasında şunları söyledi: “Kullarımdan biri seni şu kadar kere görsün ve seni evrenin düzeninde yeri önceden belli bir şiirde bir suret ve simge olarak kullansın diye bu hapishanede yaşayacak ve öleceksin. Şimdi tutsaksın, ama şiire bir sözcük katmış olacaksın.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

“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.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from The Garden of Forking Paths

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Popular quotes

“...so the Americans just get a whole bunch of guns and shoot at England until it goes away and then they shoot at the conquistadors until they go away too. Then they shoot at the natives and then when they run out of natives they shoot at each other. Then they’ve still got a lot of bullets left over so they have to keep finding more people to shoot. Also, I think someone writes a constitution? Anyway, that’s where America comes from.
So the moral of the story is that the primary ingredient for a successful nation is guns.”
― Cory O'Brien, quote from Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology

“When the landscape of real life gets ugly, we can pick up a book of fantasy and find a beautiful world, all green and filled with sunshine. When we can't find and end to something sad, there's always a novel where everything turns out okay and makes us feel better about things. And even though we know they're made up, we think that maybe there's just a possibility, in spite of all the ugliness around us, we really do have a chance to make it all work out. Because we read it. And we wanted it to be real." (Ryan)”
― Dan Skinner, quote from Memorizing You

“I’m not here to fight, Nate,” Jenny said. That was strange, because my first impulse was to throw a giant ball of flame at her. “You shot me,” I said holding back my sudden anger. “With a tranquilizer dart.” “Oh, that’s okay then. Wanna shoot me a few more times?” Jenny smiled; she had a nice smile. She’d”
― Steve McHugh, quote from Crimes Against Magic

“The eternal sea of politics is best left to politicians.”
― Wayne Gerard Trotman, quote from Veterans of the Psychic Wars

“Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.”
― René Descartes, quote from Meditations on First Philosophy

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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