Reality is not always probable, or likely.

The line underscores a recurring Borgesian idea: the real often violates the expectations by which we judge plausibility. What seems “probable” is usually a product of narrative convention, habit, or statistical intuition—frameworks that help us make sense of experience but can mislead us about what can actually occur. Read this way, the quote challenges the tendency to equate truth with what feels likely, and it hints at Borges’s fascination with paradox, coincidence, and the uncanny logic of events. It also gestures toward the difference between art’s demand for coherence and life’s indifference to it: reality can be abrupt, excessive, or improbable without ceasing to be real.