8 Jorge Luis Borges Quotes on Reading

Jorge Luis Borges quotes on reading

6. Reading ... is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

19. Villari took no notice of them because the idea of a coincidence between art and reality was alien to him. Unlike people who read novels, he never saw himself as a character in a work of art.

23. Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.

30. 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.

32. 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.

99. A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

100. Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.

130. Que otros se jacten de las paginas que han escrito; a mi me enorgullecen las que he leido.