The Library of Babel Literature and Writing Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)

Quote #7

At that period there was much talk of The Vindications – books of apologiae and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men's futures. (8)

This is another example of a seriously cool imaginary item that has to be included in the Library if we assume that it's a total Library. Where does Borges come up with this stuff?

Quote #8

It would be pointless to observe that the finest volume of all the many hexagons that I myself administer is titled Combed Thunder, while another is titled The Plaster Cramp, and another Axaxaxas mlö. Those phrases, at first apparently incoherent, are undoubtedly susceptible to cryptographic or allegorical "reading"; that reading, that justification of the words' order and existence, is itself verbal and, ex hypothesi, already contained somewhere in the Library. (13)

Oh man... just when we figured we at least knew how to separate the ridiculous phrases in the Library from the ones that make sense, here the narrator explains to us that everything in the Library has some sort of hidden meaning. Every phrase has a sort of decoder key that must be written down somewhere in the Library.

Quote #9

There is no combination of characters one can make – dhcmrlchtdj, for example – that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. (13)

Even random jumbles of letters are like a code that can be decoded by a key written down somewhere in the Library.