Quotes by Argentinian Authors - Page 5

The revolution is not an apple that falls when ripe. You have to make it fall.
Ernesto Che Guevara
One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.
Antonio Porchia
How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?
Jorge Luis Borges
Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.
Alberto Manguel
There is nothing but quotations left for us. Our language is a system of quotations.
Jorge Luis Borges
The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.
Julio Cortázar
Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.
Jorge Luis Borges
God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast.Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life....upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man.
Jorge Luis Borges
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
To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredón [execution wall].
Ernesto Che Guevara
It seemed incredible that this day, a day without warnings or omens, might be that of my implacable death.
Jorge Luis Borges
Novels include padding; I think padding may be an essential part of the novel, for all I know.
Jorge Luis Borges
I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.
Julio Cortázar
I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I will be with the people.
Ernesto Che Guevara
You have to fight to reach your dream. You have to sacrifice and work hard for it.
Lionel Messi
I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.
Jorge Luis Borges
We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbor, and they might fly away.
Jorge Luis Borges
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it.
Jorge Luis Borges
So witless did these ideas strike me as being, so sweeping and pompous the way they were expressed, that I associated them immediately with literature.
Jorge Luis Borges
Scientists say that somewhere in the universe, every event under the sun repeats itself an infinite number of times in every possible variation.
Romina Russell
Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.
Alberto Manguel
It is the definition of the word 'object' which destroys all religions.
Bill Gaede
A friend or an enemy can tell me something about my subjective being, a casual lover can judge my body — the man I love judges my entire being. Every one of his caresses tells me how I am: attractive, desirable. Every one of his questions and answers tells me what I am: a person with whom he wants to enjoy himself, who interests him more than all the others he knows. By choosing me among all others, my love has made me unique; I alone in all the world am the one he loves, and no other. If I am lucky in love, the definitions become more precise from day to day; after each date I know even better than before what I want to know about myself. The others can say what they like about me; I don't have to believe a word of it. Only the one I love can tell me about myself. Since his definitions grow increasingly precise, my dependence on him also grows more acute as time goes on, but he is in the same position with regard to me. I tell him that I belong to him alone, that he can do with me what he likes, that I cannot live without him.
Esther Vilar
I do not know which of us has written this page.
Jorge Luis Borges
A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.
Bill Gaede
One learns not to need by needing.
Antonio Porchia
Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.
Jorge Luis Borges
I'm alone and nobody is in the mirror
Jorge Luis Borges
Blind to all fault, destiny can be ruthless at one's slightest distraction.
Jorge Luis Borges
When you do what you love, there is nothing you need to worry about. Everything comes easily.
Mabel Katz
And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges
Atheism is the opium of the mathematicians. Atheism is the religion of Mathematics.
Bill Gaede
Tearing money is an impiety, like throwing away bread.
Jorge Luis Borges
Do not empower your negative thoughts by giving them “legs” so they can run around your mind, creating worries,frustrations, and anxiety in your life.
Rodolfo Costa
Q. How soon do you expect Argentina to be returned to democratic government?A. We believe we are already within a democratic system. Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people's will, but nevertheless we still think we are within a democracy.
Roberto Eduardo Viola
I had a real life completely separate from beliefs, from the common reality made up of shared beliefs...
César Aira
A mathematician says that an electromagnetic wave travels from Andromeda to your eye and that it also extends from Andromeda to your eye.
Bill Gaede
Each man must administer his hatred cautiously. Mine is equitable. I distribute it evenly among those who are frozen in the past and those who perspire in the present. Because while the former are hemorrhoidal in their sensibility, the latter are constipated in the brain. And they complement each other by both betraying the law of life that demands the immediate defecation of all useless detritus, be it antiquated illusion or contemporary cowardice.
Juan Filloy
Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.
Andrés Neuman
There are official searchers, inquisitors. I have seen them in the performance of their function: they always arrive extremely tired from their journeys; they speak of a broken stairway which almost killed them; they talk with the librarian of galleries and stairs; sometimes they pick up the nearest volume and leaf through it, looking for infamous words. Obviously, no one expects to discover anything.
Jorge Luis Borges
There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them.
Jorge Luis Borges
Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
Alberto Manguel
When will women become civilized enough to stop mistreating men? When will they cease from training their lovers to become providers, merely because they have the power to do so?As long as they continue as they are, men have no alternative to polygamy.
Esther Vilar
As to whether a poem has been written by a great poet or not, this is important only to historians of literature. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that I have written a beautiful line; let us take this as a working hypothesis. Once I have written it, that linedoes me no good, because, as I’ve already said, that line came to me from the Holy Ghost, from the subliminal self, or perhaps from some other writer. I often find I am merely quoting something I read some time ago, and then that becomes a rediscovering. Perhaps it is better that a poet should be nameless.
Jorge Luis Borges
Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony.Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight's frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad's haunts or Ariosto's vast geographies.For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Jorge Luis Borges
It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.
Carlos María Domínguez
(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
Julio Cortázar
Identity is gradual, cumulative; because there is no need for it to manifest itself, it shows itself intermittently, the way a star hints at the pulse of its being by means of its flickering light. But at what moment in this oscillation is our true self manifested? In the darkness or the twinkle?
Sergio Chejfec
Don't shut love out of your life by saying it's impossible to find time. The quickest way to receive love is to give the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly and the best way to keep love is to give it wings.
Brian Dyson
So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.
Jorge Luis Borges
I suspected once that any human life, however intricate and full it might be, consisted in reality of one moment: the moment when a man knows for all time who he is.
Jorge Luis Borges
On the surface, there is no distinction between our experiences—some are vivid, others opaque; some are pleasant, others cause agony upon recollection—but there is no way of knowing which are dreams and which are reality.
Silvina Ocampo
In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long.
Alberto Manguel
The world encyclopedia, the universal library, exists, and it is the world itself.
Alberto Manguel
I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.
Alberto Manguel
What need does the earth have of us?
Pope Francis
In order to fly you have to create space in the open air so that your wings can really spread out. It’s like a parachute. They only work from a high altitude. To fly you have to begin taking risks. If you don’t want to, maybe the best thing is just to give up, and keep walking forever.
Jorge Bucay
Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.
Alberto Manguel
We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are.
Alberto Manguel
I believe the secret of the success of psychoanalysis resides in people's vanity.
Jorge Luis Borges