Selected Poems Quotes

“The Suicide

Not a single star will be left in the night.
The night will not be left.
I will die and, with me,
the weight of the intolerable universe.
I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions,
the continents and faces.
I shall erase the accumulated past.
I shall make dust of history, dust of dust.
Now I am looking on the final sunset.
I am hearing the last bird.
I bequeath nothingness to no one.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Let not the rash marble risk
garrulous breaches of oblivion's omnipotence,
in many words recalling
name, renown, events, birthplace.
All those glass jewels are best left in the dark.
Let not the marble say what men do not.
The essentials of the dead man's life--
the trembling hope,
the implacable miracle of pain, the wonder of sensual delight--
will abide forever.
Blindly the uncertain soul asks to continue
when it is the lives of others that will make that happen,
as you yourself are the mirror and image
of those who did not live as long as you
and others will be (and are) your immortality on earth.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“God has created nights well-populated
with dreams, crowded with mirror images,
so that man may feel that he is nothing more
than vain reflection. That's what frightens us.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Three hundred nights like three hundred walls
must rise between my love and me
and the sea will be a black art between us.
Time with a hard hand will tear out
the streets tangled in my breast.
Nothing will be left but memories.
(O afternoons earned with suffering,
nights hoping for the sight of you,
dejected vacant lots, poor sky
shamed in the bottom of the puddles
like a fallen angel. . . .
And your life that graces my desire
and that run-down and lighthearted neighborhood
shining today in the glow of my love. . . .)
Final as a statue
your absence will sadden other fields.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“The Moon"

There is such loneliness in that gold.
The moon of the nights is not the moon
Who the first Adam saw. The long centuries
Of human vigil have filled her
With ancient lament. Look at her. She is your mirror.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Equivocamos esa paz con la muerte
y creemos anhelar nuestro fin
y anhelamos el sueno y la indiferencia.

(We mistake peace for death
and we believe we long for our end
when what we long for is sleep and indifference.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Afterglow"

Sunset is always disturbing
whether theatrical or muted,
but still more disturbing
is that last desperate glow
that turns the plain to rust
when on the horizon nothing is left
of the pomp and clamor of the setting sun.
How hard holding on to that light, so tautly drawn
and different,
that hallucination which the human fear of the dark
imposes on space
and which ceases at once
the moment we realize its falsity,
the way a dream is broken
the moment the sleeper knows he is dreaming.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Happy is he who forgives others and who forgives himself.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Today is tomorrow and yesterday.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“I am this groping intensity that is a soul.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Matthew XV:30”

The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet
the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.
Steam hisses up and up into the night,
which becomes at a stroke the night of the Last Judgment.

From the unseen horizon
and from the very center of my being,
an infinite voice pronounced these things—
things, not words. This is my feeble translation,
time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word:

“Stars, bread, libraries of East and West,
playing-cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars,
a human body to walk with on the earth,
fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death,
shadows for forgetting, mirrors busily multiplying,
cascades in music, gentlest of all time's shapes.
Borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings,
a bronze weight, a copy of the Grettir Saga,
algebra and fire, the charge at Junín in your blood,
days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,
love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering,
dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,
and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy—
all this was given to you, and with it
the ancient nourishment of heroes—
treachery, defeat, humiliation.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you,
in vain the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman’s eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“What is past is what is real.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“What can I hold you with?
I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the moon of the ragged
suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked long and long
at the lonely moon.[…]
I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow
—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with
dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about yourself, authentic
and surprising news of yourself.
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.

from “Two English Poems”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Aquí también esa desconocida
Y ansiosa y breve cosa que es la vida.

(Here too the never understood,
Anxious, and brief affair that is life.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“A veces en las tardes una cara
Nos mira desde el fondo de un espejo;
El arte debe ser como ese espejo
Que nos revela nuestra propia cara.

(At times in the evenings a face
Looks at us out of the depths of a mirror;
Art should be like that mirror
Which reveals to us our own face.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Un idioma es una tradición, un modo de sentir la realidad, no un arbitrario repertorio de símbolos.

(A language is a tradition, a way of grasping reality, not an arbitrary assemblage of symbols.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Vivimos descubriendo y olvidando
esa dulce costumbre de la noche.
Hay que mirarla bien. Puede ser última.

(Our life is spent discovering and forgetting
that gentle habit of the night.
Take a good look. It could be the last.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“But the days are a web of small troubles,
And is there a greater blessing
Than to be the ash of which oblivion is made?
Pero los dias son una red de triviales miserias,
y habra suerte mejor que la ceniza
de que esat hecho el ovido?”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“I kept getting close to happiness and have stood in the shadow of suffering.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“...I Fear the mirror may disclose
The true, unvarnished visage of my soul,
Bruised by shadows, black and blue with guilt-
The face God sees, that men perhaps see too.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“ELEGIJA O NEMOGUĆOJ USPOMENI

Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
na prašnjav puteljak sa niskim ogradama
i visokog konjanika što zoru ispunjava
(pohaban dugački pončo)
jednog dana među danima ravnice,
jednog dana bez datuma.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
na majku koja posmatra jutro
na estansiji Svete Irene
a ne zna da će se zvati Borhes.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
da sam se borio kod Sepede
i video Estanislaa Del Kampa
kako pozdravlja prvi kuršum
s radošću hrabra čoveka.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
na kapiju skrivenog letnjikovca
koju je moj otac svake večeri zatvarao
pre no što bi se izgubio u snu
i koju je zatvorio poslednji put
četrnaestog februara 38.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
na Hengistove čunove
koji kreću sa peščanih obala Danske
da osvoje ostrvo
koje još Engleska ne beše.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
(imao sam ga i izgubio)
na jedno zlatasto Tarnerovo platno
široko kao muzika.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
da sam čuo Sokrata
kad je pred veče kukute
s vedrinom ispitivao problem
besmrtnosti,
naizmenično navodeći mitove i razloge
dok se plava smrt penjala
iz već studenih nogu.
Šta ne bih dao za sećanje
da si mi rekla da me voliš
i da nisam spavao do zore,
bestidan i srećan.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“Europe was lost, but there were other scions:
The dream bequeathed a grand inheritance
To people of the Orient's arid lands
And those who share the sultry night with lions.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“That I might be allowed to dream the other
Whose fertile memory will be a part
Of all the days of man, I humbly pray;
My god, my dreamer, keep on dreaming me”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“There is a line by Verlaine that I will not remember again.
There is a street nearby that is off limits to my feet.
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.
There is a door I have closed until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I’m looking at them now) are some I will never open.
This summer I will be fifty years old.
Death is using me up, relentlessly.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“But again the world has been spared.
Light roams the streets inventing dirty colours
And with a certain remorse
For my complicity in the day’s rebirth
I ask my house to exist”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“But again the world has been spared.
Light romans the streets inventing dirty colours
And with a certain remorse
For my complicity in the day’s rebirth
I ask my house to exist”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“I think of things that weren't, but might have been.
The treatise on Saxon myths Bede never wrote.
The inconceivable work Dante might have had a glimpse of,
As soon as he’d corrected the Comedy’s last verse.
History without the afternoons of the Cross and the hemlock.
History without the face of Helen.
Man without the eyes that gave us the moon.
On Gettysburg’s three days, victory for the South.
The love we never shared.
The wide empire the Vikings chose not to found.
The world without the wheel or the rose.
The view John Donne held of Shakespeare.
The other horn of the Unicorn.
The fabled Irish bird that lights on two trees at once.
The child I never had.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“A alma busca o fim, com urgência./Escureceu um pouco. Já morreu./Anda uma mosca pela carne quieta./Que pode me servir que aquele homem/tenha sofrido, se eu sofro agora?/// O alívio que tu e eu sentiremos no instante que precede a morte, quando a sorte nos desate do triste costume de ser alguém e do peso do universo./// Somos o vão rio prefixado, rumo a seu mar. Pela sombra cercado./Tudo nos disse adeus, tudo nos deixa./A memória não cunha sua moeda./E no entanto há algo que se queda/e no entanto há algo que se queixa/// Que são as nuvens? Uma arquitetura do azar? Deus, talvez, as necessita para a execução de Sua infinita obra e são fios da trama obscura. Talvez a nuvem seja não menos vã do que o homem que a olha de manhã/// Aos outros resta o universo; à minha penumbra, o hábito do verso///Não há outros paraísos a não ser os paraísos perdidos.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“The pettiest will be generous
And the most craven will be brave:
Nothing improves a reputation
Like confinement to a grave.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems

“El presente está solo. La memoria
Erige el tiempo. Sucesión y engaño
Es la rutina del reloj. El año
No es menos vano que la vana historia.

(The present is singular. It is memory
that sets up time. Both succession and error
come with the routine of the clock. A year
is no less vanity than is history.)”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems