Life itself is a quotation.

The line encapsulates a characteristically Borgesian idea: that human experience is inseparable from prior texts, symbols, and inherited language. To say “life itself is a quotation” suggests that what we take as original—our identities, memories, and stories—often repeats, echoes, or recombines earlier narratives. It also implies that meaning is intertextual: life is “read” through cultural references, and our actions can feel like citations of archetypes, myths, and literary forms. In Borges’s universe of mirrors, labyrinths, and infinite libraries, the self is less an originator than a reader and rewriter of existing words.