"The number of themes, of words, of texts, is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone." -Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Alberto Manguel's With Borges

"Readers browsing through our own anthology will see that the zoology attributable to dreams is in fact considerably more modest than that attributable to God." -Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings

"One of the schools in Tlon has reached the point of denying time. It reasons that the present is undefined, that the future has no other reality than as present hope, and that the past is no more than a present memory. Another school declares that the whole of time has already happened and that our life is a vague memory or dim reflection, doubtless false and fragmented, of an irrevocable process. Another school has it that the history of the universe, which contains the history of our lives and the most tenuous details of them, is the handwriting produced by a minor god in order to communicate with a demon." -Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

From these two incontrovertible premises he deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
-Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

“To claim that it is true is nowadays the convention of every made-up story. Mine, however, is true.” -Jorge Luis Borges

"clearly, no one expects to discover anything." -Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel

No one should read self-pity or reproach
Into this statement of the majesty
Of God, who with such splendid irony
Granted me books and blindness at one touch.
-Jorge Luis Borges