The Garden of Forking Paths

Quotes

1. I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.

2. 

   Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy.

3. 

   The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as Ts'ui Pên conceived it. In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us.

4. 

   Thinking, meditating, imagining are not anomalous acts – they are the normal respiration of the intelligence. To glorify the occasional exercise of that function, to treasure beyond price ancient and foreign thoughts, to recall with incredulous awe what some doctor universalis thought, is to confess our own languor, or our own barbarie. Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he shall be.

5. 

   I have known that thing the Greeks knew not – uncertainty.

6. 

   Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

7. 

   A labyrinth of symbols... An invisible labyrinth of time.

8. 

   I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.

9. 

   There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy.

10. 

    In the work of Ts'ui Pên, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings. Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge: for example, you arrive at this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my enemy, in another, my friend.

11. 

    Ts'ui Pe must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing.

12. 

    I thought that a man can be an enemy of other men, of the moments of other men, but not of a country: not of fireflies, words, gardens, streams of water, sunsets.

13. 

    It seemed incredible to me that day without premonitions or symbols should be the one of my inexorable death.

14. 

    In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?

15. 

    My undertaking is not difficult, essentially... I should only have to be immortal to carry it out.

16. 

    Thus fought the heroes, tranquil their admirable hearts, violent their swords, resigned to kill and to die.

17. 

    Fame is a form—perhaps the worst form—of incomprehension.

18. 

    I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but warriors and brigands; I give them this counsel: The author of an atrocious undertaking ought to imagine that he has already accomplished it, ought to impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past.

19. 

    I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen; countless men in the air, on the face of the earth and the sea, and all that really is happening is happening to me . . .

That’s all the quotes.

19 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more