At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished
Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe
I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror;
I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall;
I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly
I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me
Oh God; who with such gentle irony granted me books and blindness at one touch
I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand
I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal
I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand
I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget;
I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure
To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god
Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion
I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death
To share, like thieves, the amazing treasures of days and nights.
And then it seemed, for a fleeting moment at-least, why do we translate the questions of could to rhetorics
Time is the substance I am made of.
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; I saw in a beach a terrestrial circle between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly
O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a King of infinite space...
A man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people.
No one, of course, can actually see it, but those who lay an ear against the surface tell that after some short while they perceive its busy hum
I saw the circulation of my own dark blood.
I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
I 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
Shortly before I thought i could see death, I saw the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of my own face.