Collected fictions Quotes

“All our lives we postpone everything that can be postponed; perhaps we all have the certainty, deep inside, that we are immortal and sooner or later every man will do everything, know all there is to know.”

“So my life is a point-counterpoint, a kind of fugue, and a falling away–and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.”

“Things, events, that occupy space yet come to an end when someone dies make us stop in wonder - and yet one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies with every man's or woman's death, unless the universe itself has a memory, as theosophists have suggested. In the course of time there was one day that closed the last eyes that had looked on Christ; the battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of one man. What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernández, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”

“To think is to ignore the differences, to generalize, to abstract.”

“I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.”

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.”

“The truth is that we all live by leaving behind”