I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me.
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, “What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.
The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.
Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
Reality is not always probable, or likely. But if you're writing a story, you have to make it as plausible as you can, because if not, the reader's imagination will reject it.
Loneliness does not worry me; life is difficult enough, putting up with yourself and with your own habits.
I have committed the worst of sins one can commit... I have not been happy.
I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.
Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.
Everything touches everything.
I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.
Fame is a form, perhaps the worst form, of incomprehension.
Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, the esthetic event.
The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.
A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work.
I believe books will never disappear. It is impossible for it to happen. Of all man's diverse tools, undoubtedly the most astounding are his books... If books were to disappear, history would disappear. So would man.
There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
Art is endless like a river flowing, passing, yet remaining.
Time can't be measured in days the way money is measured in pesos and centavos, because all pesos are equal, while every day, perhaps every hour, is different.
I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government.
My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them.
The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.
In my next life I will try to commit more errors.
Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.
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.
Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left...
Censorship is the mother of metaphor.
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line
A . . . poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.
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.
To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.
A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.
I think most people are more important than their opinions.
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.
There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.
May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
Truth never penetrates an unwilling mind.
The fact is that poetry is not the books in the library . . . Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
Reality is not always probable, or likely.
Chang Tzu tells us of a persevering man who after three laborious years mastered the art of dragon-slaying. For the rest of his days, he had not a single opportunity to test his skills.
For me, beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of judgement. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don't.
While we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another one
Only in the present do things happen.
Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.
Each thing implies the universe.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.
I have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
Democracy is an abuse of statistics.
It only takes two facing mirrors to build a labyrinth.
To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.
We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
What will die with me when I die, what pathetic or fragile form will the world lose?
In Spanish it is very difficult to make things flow, because words are over-long. But in English, you have light words.
I am not sure of anything, I know nothing . . . can you imagine that I don't even know the date of my own death?
The future is as irrevocable as an inflexible yesterday.
Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
The original is unfaithful to the translation.
I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.
Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger, a more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant.
We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal, bits of the irrational to form part of its architecture so as to know that it is false.
Any life, however long and complicated it may be, actually consists of a single moment — the moment when a man knows forever more who he is.
The mightiest love was granted him Love that does not expect to be loved.
Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.
When you reach my age, you realize you couldn't have done things very much better or much worse than you did them in the first place.
Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision.
The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.
I gazed at every mirror on the planet, not one gave back my reflection.
The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.
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.
Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.
Of all man’s instruments, the most wondrous, no doubt, is the book. The other instruments are extensions of his body. The microscope, the telescope, are extensions of his sight; the telephone is the extension of his voice; then we have the plow and the sword, extensions of the arm. But the book is something else altogether: the book is an extension of memory and imagination.
The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.
We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
We accept reality so readily - perhaps because we sense that nothing is real.
So plant your own gardens and decorate your own soul, instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
We have shared out, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.
When I write, I do it urged by an intimate necessity. I don't have in mind an exclusive public, or a public of multitudes, I don't think in either thing. I think about expressing what I want to say. I try to do it in the simplest way possible.
It's a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.
The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.
There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is untranslatable as music.
Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
Poets, like the blind, can see in the dark.
That is what always happens: we never know whether we are victors or whether we are defeated.
Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.
The dictionary is based on the hypothesis -- obviously an unproven one -- that languages are made up of equivalent synonyms.
Time is the tiger that devours me, but I am that tiger.
What I'm really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.
From my weakness, I drew strength that never left me.
There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done.
You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?
When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself
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.
Time is the substance of which we are made
La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.
If space is infinite, we may be at any point in space. If time is infinite, we may be at any point in time.
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.
Life itself is a quotation.
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.
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.
Creativity is suspended between memory and forgetting.
i walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive
When you come right down to it, opinions are the most superficial things about anyone
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.
Death is just infinity closing in.
It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have.
Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.
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.
Doubt is one of the names of intelligence.
