"Life itself is a quotation"
About this Quote
Life itself is a quotation compresses a lifetime of Borges’s obsessions into a single paradox. It suggests that existence is not a pure, original utterance but an echo of earlier voices, forms, and stories. We speak in inherited idioms, think in borrowed metaphors, enact scripts learned from family, culture, and books. Memory edits and splices these fragments, so that identity becomes a mosaic of citations: the way we love, mourn, hope, and fear repeats patterns we did not author. Even novelty arises against a background of precedent; the new line is legible only because it riffs on a known refrain.
Borges made a method of this insight. His fiction is crowded with mirrors, libraries, and apocryphal texts, where quotations proliferate and sources blur. Pierre Menard rewrites Don Quixote word for word and produces a different work because context transforms the citation. Tlön’s encyclopedia rewrites reality by imposing a language and metaphysics that the world begins to imitate. The labyrinthine Library of Babel implies that every book is a variation within an infinite combinatory system. He loved false attributions and invented bibliographies, dramatizing how authority itself is a chain of references. Even his Shakespeare, in Everything and Nothing, is a man composed of other people’s voices. To say life is a quotation, then, is to claim that living resembles reading and rewriting: we are always annotating, translating, and reframing what precedes us.
The line is not a lament against originality but a redefinition of it. Quotation can be creative rather than derivative, because placement, emphasis, and timing alter meaning. The ethical task becomes curatorial: which sources will we carry forward, how will we arrange them, what errors or misreadings might generate truth? Humility follows, because no one speaks alone; so does responsibility, because what we echo, we amplify. To be mortal is to be cited and to cite, a life that is both text and gloss, a voice that is simultaneously repetition and invention.
Borges made a method of this insight. His fiction is crowded with mirrors, libraries, and apocryphal texts, where quotations proliferate and sources blur. Pierre Menard rewrites Don Quixote word for word and produces a different work because context transforms the citation. Tlön’s encyclopedia rewrites reality by imposing a language and metaphysics that the world begins to imitate. The labyrinthine Library of Babel implies that every book is a variation within an infinite combinatory system. He loved false attributions and invented bibliographies, dramatizing how authority itself is a chain of references. Even his Shakespeare, in Everything and Nothing, is a man composed of other people’s voices. To say life is a quotation, then, is to claim that living resembles reading and rewriting: we are always annotating, translating, and reframing what precedes us.
The line is not a lament against originality but a redefinition of it. Quotation can be creative rather than derivative, because placement, emphasis, and timing alter meaning. The ethical task becomes curatorial: which sources will we carry forward, how will we arrange them, what errors or misreadings might generate truth? Humility follows, because no one speaks alone; so does responsibility, because what we echo, we amplify. To be mortal is to be cited and to cite, a life that is both text and gloss, a voice that is simultaneously repetition and invention.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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