The Garden of Forking Paths

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page.

Everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal. Whoever reads my words is inventing them.

Perhaps a god is deceiving me. Perhaps a god has sentenced me to time, that lasting illusion. I dream the moon and I dream my eyes perceiving the moon.

Each word, though weighed down by the centuries, opens up a blank page and posits the future.

Three very ancient faces stay with me: one is the Ocean, which would talk with Claudius, another the North, with its unfeeling temper, savage both at sunrise and at sunset; the third is Death, that other name we give to passing time, which wears us all away.

I shall be all or no one. I shall be the other I am without knowing it, he who has looked on that other dream, my waking state. He weighs it up, resigned and smiling.

The word must have been in the beginning a magic symbol, which the usury of time wore out. The mission of the poet should be to restore to the word, at least in a partial way, its primitive and now secret force.

I see the end and I see the beginning, but not what is in between. That is gradually revealed to me, when the stars or chance are propitious. More than once, I have to retrace my steps by way of the shadows. I try to interfere as little as possible in the evolution of the work. I do not want it to be distorted by my opinions, which are the most trivial things about us.

In the earliest times, which were so susceptible to vague speculation and the inevitable ordering of the universe, there can have existed no division between the poetic and the prosaic. Everything must have been tinged with magic. Thor was not the god of thunder; he was the thunder and the god.

41. Nothing is built on stone, everything on sand, but our duty is to build as if sand were stone...