The Garden of Forking Paths — Vocabulary
Jorge Luis Borges
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The instructions to turn always to the left reminded me that such was the common procedure for discovering the central point of certain labyrinths.17 more

I argued that in this way I ran less risk of being recognized; the fact is that in the deserted street I felt myself visible and vulnerable, infinitely so.†7 more

The book is an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts.†2 more

He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.†

Between the iron bars I made out a poplar grove and a pavilion.†3 more

He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times.†1 more

He faced me and in his hands he held a sheet of paper that had once been crimson, but was now pink and tenuous and cross-sectioned.†1 more

I talked with him for scarcely an hour, but during that hour he was Goethe ....I did it because I sensed that the Chief somehow feared people of my race—for the innumerable ancestors who merge within me.†2 more

To omit a word always, to resort to inept metaphors and obvious periphrases, is perhaps the most emphatic way of stressing it.†

His family, as you may be aware, wished to condemn them to the fire; but his executor—a Taoist or Buddhist monk—insisted on their publication.†1 more

Philosophic controversy usurps a good part of the novel.†

I told myself that the duel had already begun and that I had won the first encounter by frustrating, even if for forty minutes, even if by a stroke of fate, the attack of my adversary.†

Thirteen years he dedicated to these heterogeneous tasks, but the hand of a stranger murdered him—and his novel was incoherent and no one found the labyrinth.†

Not the swarming of the divergent, parallel and finally coalescent armies, but a more inaccessible, more intimate agitation that they in some manner prefigured.†

I didn't do it for Germany, no. I care nothing for a barbarous country which imposed upon me the abjection of being a spy.†1 more

After more than a hundred years, the details are irretrievable; but it is not hard to conjecture what happened.†1 more

My irrevocable determination could wait.†1 more

I went through the coaches; I remember a few farmers, a woman dressed in mourning, a young boy who was reading with fervor the Annals of Tacitus, a wounded and happy soldier.†1 more

Your illustrious ancestor?†1 more

Something—perhaps the mere vain ostentation of proving my resources were nil—made me look through my pockets.†