Shakespeare's Memory, (1983); as translated by Andrew Hurley in Collected Fictions (1998)
Jorge Luis Borges: Frases en inglés (página 7)
Jorge Luis Borges era escritor argentino. Frases en inglés.
Arrasado el jardín, profanados los cálices y las aras, entraron a caballo los hunos en la biblioteca monástica y rompieron los libros incomprensibles y los vituperaron y los quemaron, acaso temerosos de que las letras encubrieran blasfemias contra su dios, que era una cimitarra de hierro.
The Theologians [Los Teólogos]
As translated by Will Fitzgerald
Other Inquisitions (1952), The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
En mi juventud probé la mescalina y la cocaína pero enseguida me pasé a los pastillas de menta que me parecieron más estimulantes. Si las drogas producen el mismo efecto que el alcohol, no me interesan. Un borracho es evidentemente ridículo. He estado borracho algunas veces y lo recuerdo como una experiencia muy desagradable para los demás y para mí.
As quoted in Borges, El palabrista (1999) by Estebán Peicovich, p. 53
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
Variante: Today, one of the churches of Tlön Platonically maintains that a certain pain, a certain greenish tint of yellow, a certain temperature, a certain sound, are the only reality. All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.
“I will pause to consider this eternity from which the subsequent ones derive.”
"A History of Eternity" in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger
"Note on Walt Whitman" ["Nota sobre Walt Whitman"]
Discussion (1932)
“Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendor.”
"The masked dyer Hakim of Merv" [El tintorero enmascarado Hakim de Merv] Universal History of Infamy (1935); also translated as "Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv" ( review of "Hakim, Masked Dyer of Merv" http://www.elimae.com/reviews/borges/merv.html)
Statement to the Argentine Society of Letters (c.1946)
"A Poem by Oscar Wilde" http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_wilde.html (1925) An essay on Wilde and his Ballad of Reading Gaol.
“The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”
On the Falklands War, as quoted in Time magazine (14 February 1983)
“Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.”
"Pascal’s Sphere" ["La esfera de Pascal"] (1951)
Variant translations: Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.
It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.
Other Inquisitions (1952)
Autobiographical Notes (1970)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1942), The Garden of Forking Paths
“The minotaur more than justifies the existence of the labyrinth.”
"Ibn-Hakim Al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth", in The Aleph (1949); tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
“Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality.”
"Partial Magic in the Quixote", Labyrinths (1964)