I recently read Borges’ Ficciones and was mesmerised by the prose, even after its translation from Spanish. Below I compile my favourite excerpts, grouped by why I like them.

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​These excerpts narrate humdrum or unsophisticated human experiences, somehow rendered eloquent and exceptional:

• My general memory of Don Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, is much the same as the imprecise, anterior image of a book not yet written.
  
  
• On 14 February, I received a telegram from Buenos Aires telling me to return immediately, for my father was 'in no way well'. God forgive me, but the prestige of being the recipient of an urgent telegram, the desire to point out to all of Fray Bentos the contradiction between the negative form of the news and the positive adverb, the temptation to dramatize my sorrow as I feigned a virile stoicism, all no doubt distracted me from the possibility of anguish.

 

• At the end of seven years, it is impossible for me to recuperate the details of the action. But I will outline its plot, exactly as my forgetfulness now impoverishes (exactly as it now purifies) it.
  
  

• I supposed that this undocumented country and its anonymous heresiarch had been deliberately invented by Bioy out of modesty, to substantiate a phrase.

 

• [of a patient in a sanatorium]
  During these days Dahlmann hated himself in minute detail: he hated his identity, his bodily necessities, his humiliation, the beard which bristled upon his face. He stoically endured the curative measures, which were painful. But when the surgeon told him he had been on the point of death from septicemia, Dahlmann dissolved in tears of self-pity for his fate. Physical wretchedness and the incessant anticipation of horrible nights had not allowed him time to think of anything so abstract as death.
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• There was no means of conveyance to be seen, but the station chief supposed that the traveller might secure a vehicle from a general store and inn to be found some ten or twelve blocks away. Dahlmann accepted the walk as a small adventure. ... In order to add one more event to that day and to kill time, Dahlmann decided to eat at the general store.

 

• 'Señor Dahlmann, don't pay any attention to those lads; they're half high'. Dahlmann was not surprised to learn that the other man, now, knew his name. But he felt that the conciliatory words served only to aggravate the situation. Previous to this moment, the peones' provocation was directed against an unknown face, against no one in particular, almost against no one at all. Now it was an attack against him, against his name, and his neighbours knew it.

 

• The tough with a Chinese look staggered heavily to his feet. Almost in Juan Dahlmann's face, he shouted insults, as if he had been a long way off. His game was to exaggerate his drunkenness, and this extravagance constituted a ferocious mockery.

 

• From the corner of the room, the old ecstatic gaucho threw him a naked dagger, which landed at his feet. It was as if the South had resolved that Dahlmann should accept the duel. Dahlmann bent over to pick up the dagger, and felt two things. The first, that this almost instinctive act bound him to fight. The second, that the weapon, in his torpid hand, was no defence at all, but would merely serve to justify his murder.
  ​​
  

Borges frequently “breaks the fourth wall” with disarming disclaimers about his narration…

• The scribe who draws up a contract scarcely ever fails to introduce some erroneous datum; I myself, in making this hasty declaration, have falsified or invented some grandeur, some atrocity; perhaps, too, a certain mysterious monotony.

 

• We entered (I seem to remember) through the back part of the house.
  
  
• It was a book, an octavo volume. Ashe left it in the bar where, months later, I found it. I began to leaf through it and felt a sudden curious lightheadedness, which I will not go into, since this is the story, not of my particular emotions, but of Uqbar.
  
  
• Here, I conclude the personal part of my narrative. The rest, when it is not in their hopes or their fears, is at least in the memories of all my readers. It is enough to recall or to mention subsequent events, in as few words as possible; that concave basin which is the collective memory will furnish the wherewithal to enrich or amplify them.
  
  
• I come now to the most difficult point in my narrative. For the entire story has no other point (the reader might as well know it by now) than this dialogue of almost a half-century ago. I shall not attempt to reproduce his words, now irrecoverable. I prefer truthfully to make a résumé of the many things Ireneo told me. The indirect style is remote and weak; I know that I sacrifice the effectiveness of my narrative; but let my readers imagine the nebulous sentences which clouded that night.

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and litters his stories with charming essayistic rhetoric:
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• I am certain that it would be very easy to challenge my meagre authority. I hope, nevertheless, that I will not be prevented from mentioning two important testimonials:

 

• To my mind, the idea is not very stimulating. I will not say the same of this other one:

 

• After rereading, I am apprehensive lest I have not sufficiently underlined the book's virtues. It contains some very civilized expressions:
  
  
• It is unnecessary to add that [further point]
  
  
• Shall I confess that [opinion]?
  
  
• We need only recall [evidence]
  
  
• I believe I have mentioned [previous point]
  
  
• [subject] - who would deny it? - [claim]
  ​​

Borges embeds his masterstroke of incredible wit and humour into almost every story:

• In life, he suffered from a sense of unreality, as do so many Englishmen; dead, he is not even the ghostly creature he was then. ... My father and he had cemented (the verb is excessive) one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.
  
  
• Hladík was past forty. Apart from a few friendships and many habits, the problematic practice of literature constituted his life. Like every writer, he measured the virtues of other writers by their performance, and asked that they measure him by what he conjectured or planned. … He did not work for posterity, nor even for God, of whose literary preferences he possessed scant knowledge.
  
  
• The popular magazines have publicized it, with pardonable zeal, the zoology and topography of Tlön. I think, however, that its transparent tigers and its towers of blood scarcely deserve the unwavering attention of all men.
  
  
• He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front).
  
  

• He was scarcely twenty years old. He was thin and soft at the same time. He gave one the uncomfortable impression of being invertebrate. He had studied, with fervour and vanity, every page of some communist manual or other; dialectical materialism served him as a means to end any and all discussion. The reasons that one man may have to abominate another, or love him, are infinite: Moon reduced universal history to a sordid economic conflict.
  
  
• No book is ever published without some variant in each copy. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate, vary.

 

• [among the enumerated works of a late author]
  (e) A technical article on the possibility of enriching the game of chess by means of eliminating one of the rooks' pawns. Menard proposes, recommends, disputes, and ends by rejecting this innovation.
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• The deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian will hinder me from falling into a dithyramb - an obligatory form in the Uruguay, when the theme is an Uruguayan.
  
  
• He asserted that the revolution was predestined to triumph. I told him that only lost causes can interest a gentleman
  
  
• [of a captive facing impending execution]
  He faced these imaginary executions with true terror (perhaps true courage). Each simulacrum lasted a few seconds. ... Then he would reflect that reality does not tend to coincide with forecasts about it. With perverse logic he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Faithful to this feeble magic, he would invent, so that they might not happen, the most atrocious particulars. Naturally, he finished by fearing that these particulars were prophetic.
  
  
• [of a secret society]
  The Secret is sacred, but it is also somewhat ridiculous. The practice of the mystery is furtive and even clandestine, and its adepts do not speak about it. There are no respectable words to describe it, but it is understood that all words refer to it, or better, that they inevitably allude to it, and thus, in dialogue with initiates, when I have prattled about anything at all, they have smiled enigmatically or taken offence, for they have felt that I touched upon the Secret.
  ​
  

Some must be plainly praised for - beyond their thought-provoking philosophical or literary values - being fucking hilarious:

• Any insinuation that Menard dedicated his life to the writing of a contemporary Don Quixote is a calumny of his illustrious memory. He did not want to compose another Don Quixote - which would be so easy - but the Don Quixote. It is unnecessary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide - word for word, and line for line - with those of Miguel de Cervantes. ... The initial method he conceived was relatively simple: to know Spanish well, to re-embrace the Catholic faith, to fight against Moors and Turks, to forget European history between 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. Pierre Menard studied this procedure (I know that he arrived at a rather faithful handling of seventeenth-century Spanish) but rejected it as too easy. ... To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous - and consequently less interesting - than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.
  
  ...
  
  The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. It is a revelation to compare the Don Quixote of Menard with that of Cervantes. The latter, for instance, wrote:
  
  [truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future]
  
  Written in the seventeenth century, written by the 'ingenious layman' Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical eulogy of history. Menard, on the other hands, writes:
  
  ​[truth, whose mother is history, who is the rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, example and lesson to the present, and warning to the future]
  
  History, mother of truth; the idea is astounding.
  
  ...
  
  Equally vivid is the contrast in styles. The archaic style of Menard - in the last analysis, a foreigner - suffers from a certain affectation. Not so that of his precursor, who handles easily the ordinary Spanish of his time.
  ​

Through the rants of his characters and unfaithful narrators, Borges dishes out a multitude of effortless profundities:

• The man does not exist who, outside his own specialty, is not incredulous.
  
  
• The other was one of those parasitic books which places Christ on a boulevard, Hamlet on the Canebière and Don Quixote on Wall Street. Like any man of good taste, Menard detested these useless carnivals, only suitable - he used to say - for evoking plebeian delight in anachronism, or (what is worse) charming us with the primary idea that all epochs are the same, or that they are different.
  
  
• I thought that a man might be an enemy of other men, of the differing moments of other men, but never an enemy of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams, or the West wind.
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• There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chapter - if not a paragraph or a noun - in the history of philosophy. In literature, this ultimate decay is even more notorious. Don Quixote was above all an agreeable book; now it is an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance and obscene de-luxe editions. Glory is an incomprehension, and perhaps the worst.
  
  
• To think, analyse and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional fulfilment of this function, to treasure ancient thoughts of others, to remember with incredulous amazement that the doctor universalis thought, is to confess our languor or barbarism. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.
  
  
• That a present-day book should derive from an ancient one is clearly honourable: especially since no one likes to be indebted to his contemporaries. The repeated, but insignificant, contacts of Joyce's Ulysses with the Homeric Odyssey continue to enjoy - I shall never know why - the harebrained admiration of the critics.
  
  
• Ten years ago, any symmetrical system whatsoever which gave the appearance of order - dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism - was enough to fascinate men. Why not fall under the spell of Tlön and submit to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet? Useless to reply that reality, too, is ordered. It may be so, but in accordance with divine laws - I translate: inhuman laws - which we will never completely perceive.
  
  
• Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.
  
  
• Any father is interested in the sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion of happiness.

 

• Flaubert and Henry James have accustomed us to suppose that works of art are infrequent and laboriously composed. The sixteenth century (we need only recall Cervantes' Viaje al Parnaso, or Shakespeare's destiny) did not share this disconsolate opinion. Neither did Herbert Quain. He thought that good literature was common enough, that there is scarce a dialogue in the street which does not achieve it. ... Quain was in the habit of arguing that readers were an already extinct species. 'Every European,' he reasoned, 'is a writer, potentially or in fact.'
  
  
• In order to perceive the distance which exists between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare the rude tremulous symbols which my fallible hand scribbles on the end pages of a book with the organic letters inside: exact, delicate, intensely black, inimitably symmetric.
  
  
• What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer is right: I am all others, any man is all men. Shakespeare is in some way the wretched John Vincent Moon.

 

• By dint of taking pity on the misfortunes of the heroes of novels we come to take too much pity on our own misfortunes.
  
  
• The fact that any philosophical system is bound in advance to be a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, means that systems abound, unbelievable systems, beautifully constructed or else sensational in effect.
  
  
• His years had reduced and polished him as water does a stone or the generations of men do a sentence.
  
  
• The ultimate goal of a theological or metaphysical demonstration - the external world, God, chance, universal forms - is no less anterior or common than this novel which I am now developing. The only difference is that philosophers publish in pleasant volumes the intermediary stages of their work and that I have decided to lose them.
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• We conjecture that this 'brave new world' was the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, mathematicians, moralists, painters, and geometricians, all under the supervision of an unknown genius. There are plenty of individuals who have mastered these various disciplines without having any facility for invention, far less for submitting that inventiveness to a strict, systematic plan.
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 Finally, it would be a grave injustice to leave uncredited Borges exceptional abilities in compelling storytelling:

• A sudden rising of the Tacuarembó river compelled us to test (and to suffer patiently) the rudimentary hospitality of the general store. The grocer set up some creaking cots for us in a large room, cluttered with barrels and wineskins. We went to bed, but were kept from sleeping until dawn by the drunkenness of an invisible neighbour, who alternated between shouting indecipherable abuse and singing snatches of milongas, or rather, snatches of the same milonga. As might be supposed, we attributed this insistent uproar to the fiery rum of the proprietor... At dawn, the man lay dead in the corridor. The coarseness of his voice had deceived us; he was a young boy.
  
  
• A brick flung by a Hindu comes flying from a rooftop; someone sinks a dagger into another's belly; someone - Moslem? Hindu? - is killed and is stamped underfoot. Three thousand men battle: cane against revolver, obscenity against imprecation, God the Indivisible against the Gods. Aghast, the free-thinking student joins the fray. With desperate hands he kills (or thinks he kills) a Hindu. ... Almost beneath the hooves of the horses, the student takes flight; he makes for the farthest outskirts of town. He crosses two sets of railroad tracks, or the same tracks twice.

 

• In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labours.

 

• Shattering volleys of rifle fire reverberated in the south. I told Moon that our comrades expected us. My trench coat and revolver were in my room; when I returned, I found Moon stretched on the sofa, his eyes shut. He thought he had fever; he spoke of a painful shoulder spasm. I realized then that his cowardice was irreparable. I awkwardly urged him to take care of himself and took my leave. I blushed for this fearful man, as if I, and not Vincent Moon, were the coward.

If I haven't yet spoiled the entirety of the anthology, I seriously recommend reading!