It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors. - Jorge Luis Borges

Universal history is the history of a few metaphors.

You can't measure time by days, the way you measure money by dollars and cents, because dollars are all the same while every day is different and maybe every hour as well.

It is love. I will have to run or hide.

The walls of its prison rise up, as in a twisted dream. The beautiful mask has changed, but as always it is the one. Of what use are my talismans: the literary exercises, the vague erudition, the knowledge of words used by the harsh North to sing its seas and swords, the temperate friendship, the galleries of the Library, the common things, the habits, the young love of my mother, the militant shadow of my dead, the timeless night, the taste of dreams?

Being with you or being without you is the measure of my time.

Now the pitcher breaks about the spring, now the man arises to the sound of birds, now those that watch at the windows have gone dark, but the darkness has brought no peace.

It, I know, is love: the anxiety and the relief at hearing your voice, the expectation and the memory, the horror of living in succession.

It is love with its mythologies, with its tiny useless magics.

There exists a corner that I dare not cross.

Now the armies confine me, the hordes.

(This room is unreal; she has not seen it.)

The name of a woman gives me away.

A woman hurts me in all of my body.

I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. [...] The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.