Adolfo Bioy Casares Quotes

Life has now taught me that love for things, like all unrequited love, takes its toll in the long run.

I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.

I believe we lose immortality because we have not conquered our opposition to death; we keep insisting on the primary, rudimentary idea: that the whole body should be kept alive. We should seek to preserve only the part that has to do with consciousness.

The habits of our lives makes us presume that things will happen in a certain foreseeable way, that there will be a vague coherence in the world.

I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior. The right combination of circumstances had enabled me to observe them. One seldom has the chance to be a clandestine witness of several talks between the same people. But scenes are repeated in life, just as they are in the theatre.

Never hope, to avoid disappointment; consider myself dead, to keep from dying

Under the bludgeonings of fate
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone.
Human beings themselves, after death, become figures in a dream to the survivors , they fade away and are forgotten, like dreams that were once convincing, but which no one cares to hear about. There are parents who find in their children a receptive audience, with the result that in the child's credulous imagination they find a last semblance of life, which quickly dims out as if they had never existed ...

His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive.

The body is imaginary, and we bow to the tyranny of a phantom. Love is a privilege perception, the most total and lucid not only of the unreality of the world but of our own unreality: not only do we traverse a realm of shadows; but ourselves are shadows.

The sea is endless when you are in a rowboat.

To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares,- to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost (perhaps we always want the person we love to have the existenceof a ghost).

And the reason I am so nervous is that everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures ... Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future.

Sublime, close at hand but mysterious
With the living silence of the rose.

The case of the inventor who is duped by his own invention emphasizes our need for circumspection.