Reasons to Read Borges

• “Copulation and mirrors are abominable.[...]For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or (more precisely) a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.“

• “Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me…”

• “If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.”
• “To speak is to fall into tautology.”

• “You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?”

• “God made Himself totally a man but a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of reprobation and the bass. To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.”

• “Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once. No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, Iam hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.”

• “There is nothing that is not as if lost in a maze of indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious. The elegiacal, the serious,the ceremonial, do not hold for the Immortals.”

• “I have been Homer; shortly, I shall be no one, like Ulysses; shortly, I shall be all men; I shall be dead.”

• “Perhaps some feature of that crucified countenance lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died, was obliterated, so that God could be all of us. Who knows whether tonight we shall not see it in the labyrinths of our dreams and not even know it tomorrow.”