Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers

"All things left her, all But one. Her highborn courtliness Accompanied her to the end,Beyond the rapture and its eclipse,In a way like an angel's. Of Elvira The first thing that I saw - such years ago -Was her smile and also it was the last."

"There is a line in Verlaine I shall not recall again,There is a street close by forbidden to my feet,There's a mirror that's seen me for the very last time,There is a door that I have locked till the end of the world. Among the books in my library (I have them before me)There are some that I shall never open now. This summer I complete my fiftieth year;Death is gnawing at me ceaselessly."

"God, in the dream, illumined the animal's brutishness and he understood the reasons, and accepted his destiny; but when he awoke there was only a dark resignation, a valiant ignorance, for the machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of a wild beast. Years later, Dante was dying in Ravenna, as unjustified and as lonely as any other man. In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life...upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of a man."

"Man's memory shapes Its own Eden within"

"And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger. Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild beast I longed for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or bird."

"In my soul the afternoon grows wider and I reflect."

"It must be that I am not made to be a dead man, but these places and this discussion seem like a dream, and not a dream dreamed by me but by someone else still to be born."

"Leaving behind the babble of the plaza, I enter the Library. I feel, almost physically, the gravitation of the books, the enveloping serenity of order, time magically dessicated and preserved."

"He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it."