Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

The past is never where you think you left it.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

There is immunity in reading, immunity in formal society, in office routine, in the company of old friends and in the giving of officious help to strangers, but there is no sanctuary in one bed from the memory of another. The past with its anguish will break through every defense-line of custom and habit; we must sleep and therefore we must dream.

The young remember most deeply.... When we are old and failing, it is the memories of childhood which can be summoned most clearly.

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.

I am sifting my memories, the way men pan the dirt under a barroom floor for the bits of gold dust that fall between the cracks. It's small mining-- small mining. You're too young a man to be panning memories, Adam. You should be getting yourself some new ones, so that the mining will be richer when you come to age.

You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come back and dig it up.

You don't want to get rid of your experiences, because they're your experiences - good or bad - and you need them, but it would be great if they weren't on the video shelf!

Then I turned to him commanding That he go the way he came, whence he came. But he answered me in sorrow, "May the Past not seek to borrow From the Present without blame - Just one memory from its store, Ere it goes to come no more, Back the pathway that it came, whence it came?"

Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

The past was a dream wasn't it? And who ever remembers dreams?

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

What was our life like? I almost don't remember now. Though I remember it, the space of time it occupied. And I remember it fondly.

I want to believe that memories, even sad and painful ones, should not be forgotten forever.

In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.

There you'll find the place I love most in the world. The place where I grew thin from dreaming. My village, rising from the plain. Shaded with trees and leaves like a piggy bank filled with memories. You'll see why a person would want to live there forever. Dawn, morning, mid-day, night: all the same, except for the changes in the air. The air changes the color of things there. And life whirs by as quiet as a murmur...the pure murmuring of life.

To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the lines of thought. Memory's going extinct because we rely on machines and copies and so on. The idea of working with structures that conjure dreams, personages, history, time, that can be contained in this way as you walk through your mind, is a challenge.

[Memory] visits when it is hungry, not when you are.

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again. Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling is like a festival outside my window.

These days I live in three worlds: my dreams, and the experiences of my new life, which trigger memories from the past

They would think she was savoring the taste (blueberries, cinnamon, cream-excellent), but she was actually savoring the whole morning, trying to catch it, pin it down, keep it safe before all those precious moments became yet another memory.

Mild brown eyes beckon me to the past, but memory provides no clue.

Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.

It’s great to reminisce about good memories of my past. It was enjoyable when it was today.

I was of the opinion that the past is past, and like all that is not now it should remain buried along the side of our memories.