"Poetry" (the fifth of Borges' seven conferences of 1977 in Teatro Coliseo, in Buenos Aires, later corrected and published in 1980 as a book, Siete noches/Seven Nights) (blog about Jorge Luis Borges (in Spanish) http://argentinaexchange.com/blog/?p=5296
Context: The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as indefinable as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If we feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will be weaker than our feelings?
“Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. ”
"Q&A: Tracey Ullman" http://www.newsweek.com/newsmakers-127011 (Newsweek, 19 September 2004)
“The powder is mixed with water and tastes exactly like powder mixed with water.”
On liquid diets, in New York Herald Tribune (29 December 1960).
Quote from De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.
1950's
"On What There Is", p. 4. a humorous comment on the idea "unactualized possible".
From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (1953)
Source: A Woman's Thoughts About Women (1858), Ch. 10
Context: I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.
