Jorge Luis Borges - Poetry Quotes

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Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry — I say to myself, What a pity I can't buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.

Jorge Luis Borges
There are people who barely feel poetry, and they are generally dedicated to teaching it.

Jorge Luis Borges
The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry.

Jorge Luis Borges
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.

Jorge Luis Borges
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.

Jorge Luis Borges
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.

Jorge Luis Borges
The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?

Jorge Luis Borges
Poetry springs from something deeper; it's beyond intelligence.

Jorge Luis Borges
My friends tell me that I am an intruder, that I don't really write when I attempt poetry. But those of my friends who write in prose say that I'm no writer when I attempt prose. So really I don't know what to do, I'm in a quandary.

Jorge Luis Borges
I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose.

Jorge Luis Borges
No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Jorge Luis Borges