A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.

Borges argues that a book’s essence is not its physical objecthood or even its literal wording, but the living exchange it creates with a reader. Meaning arises in the act of reading: the text “imposes” an inner voice, generates images, and leaves residues in memory that can persist and change over time. Calling a book “a relationship” and an “axis of innumerable relationships” extends this beyond the individual reader to a web of intertextual and cultural connections—other books, other readers, prior traditions, and future interpretations. The quote encapsulates Borges’s view of literature as dynamic, relational, and endlessly reactivated.