# Quote — Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

> 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.

- Author: [Jorge Luis Borges](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jorge-luis-borges.md)
- Book: [The Garden of Forking Paths](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jorge-luis-borges/the-garden-of-forking-paths.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges#The_Garden_of_Forking_Paths_(1942)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/jorge-luis-borges/the-garden-of-forking-paths/writing-long-books

## More from this book

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jorge-luis-borges/the-garden-of-forking-paths/i-leave-to-the.md)

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jorge-luis-borges/the-garden-of-forking-paths/time-forks-perpetually.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/jorge-luis-borges/the-garden-of-forking-paths/the-garden-of-forking.md)