Top 83 Julio Cortazar Quotes
#1. I realized that searching was my symbol, the emblem of those who go out at night with nothing in mind, the motives of a destroyer of compasses.
Julio Cortazar
#2. And jazz is like a bird who migrates or emigrates or immigrates or transmigrates, roadblock jumper, smuggler, something that runs and mixes in
Julio Cortazar
#3. La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Julio Cortazar
#4. Habits, Andrea, are concrete forms of rhythm, are that portion of rhythm which helps to keep us alive.
Julio Cortazar
#5. I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does
Julio Cortazar
#6. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.
Julio Cortazar
#7. Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
Julio Cortazar
#8. I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
Julio Cortazar
#9. I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all
directions ...
Julio Cortazar
#10. And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?
Julio Cortazar
#11. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortazar
#12. We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.
Julio Cortazar
#13. There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.
Julio Cortazar
#14. You have to live by fighting each other, it's the law, the only way that things are
worth while but it hurts
Julio Cortazar
#15. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...
Julio Cortazar
#16. I'm such a jerk; it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens; it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.
Julio Cortazar
#17. When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Julio Cortazar
#18. After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
Julio Cortazar
#19. As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. ( ... ) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
Julio Cortazar
#20. For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
Julio Cortazar
#22. Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?
Julio Cortazar
#23. Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
Julio Cortazar
#24. Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.
Julio Cortazar
#25. What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us ... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
Julio Cortazar
#26. Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.
Julio Cortazar
#28. I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order.
Julio Cortazar
#29. Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.
Julio Cortazar
#30. The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.
Julio Cortazar
#31. The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Julio Cortazar
#32. Only in dreams, in poetry, in play do we sometimes arrive at what we were before we were this thing that, who knows, we are.
Julio Cortazar
#33. Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune.
Julio Cortazar
#34. I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often.
Julio Cortazar
#35. Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.
Julio Cortazar
#36. Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.
Julio Cortazar
#37. Everything can be killed except nostalgia for the kingdom, we carry it in the color of our eyes, in every love affair, in everything that deeply torments and unties and tricks.
Julio Cortazar
#38. The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
Julio Cortazar
#39. I could sit right here and think a thousand miles away, Since I had the blues this bad, I can't remember the day ...
Julio Cortazar
#40. All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard.
Julio Cortazar
#41. And it is also the only reward for my work: to feel what I have written is like the back of a cat as it is being petted, with sparks and an arching in cadence. (page 402)
Julio Cortazar
#43. It's impossible to want what I want and in the shape I want it, and share life with others besides. I had to know how to be alone and how to let so much wanting do its work, save me or destroy me ...
Julio Cortazar
#44. The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
Julio Cortazar
#45. In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).
Julio Cortazar
#46. Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
Julio Cortazar
#47. All I have to do is to look at you to know that with you, I am going to soak my soul
Julio Cortazar
#48. If I were a moviemaker I'd set about hunting sunsets.
Julio Cortazar
#49. On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds.
Julio Cortazar
#50. Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny ... it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.
Julio Cortazar
#51. During his reading hours, which were between one and five o'clock in the morning, but not every morning, he had come to the disconcerting conclusion that whistling was not an important theme in literature.
Julio Cortazar
#52. Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape.
Julio Cortazar
#53. The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.
Julio Cortazar
#54. And there's blues in my bed, 'cause l'm sleepin' by myself.
Julio Cortazar
#55. I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don't think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit.
Julio Cortazar
#56. Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?
Julio Cortazar
#57. What we call absurd is our ignorance. The Winners, 1960
Julio Cortazar
#58. Of all our feelings the only one which really doesn't belong to us is hope. Hope belongs to life, it's life itself defending itself. Etcetera.
Julio Cortazar
#59. I love you because you are not mine, because you are from the other side, from there where you invite me to jump and I cannot make the jump, because in the deepest moment of possession you are not in me, I cannot reach you, I cannot get beyond your body ...
Julio Cortazar
#60. A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters
Julio Cortazar
#63. Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
Julio Cortazar
#64. The short-story writer knows that he can't proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space.
Julio Cortazar
#65. When you hear a Spanish cook describe a paella or a cake, you realize she's using a much richer repertoire of adjectives than what one of us would use to characterize a book or an important experience.
Julio Cortazar
#66. The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance ... something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.
Julio Cortazar
#67. I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.
Julio Cortazar
#68. All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
Julio Cortazar
#69. A hand of smoke took his hand, started him downward, if it was downward, showed him a centre, if it was a centre, put it in his stomach, where the vodka was softly making crystal bubbles, some sort of infinitely beautiful and desperate illusion which some time back he had called immortality.
Julio Cortazar
#70. The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.
Julio Cortazar
#72. (memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
Julio Cortazar
#73. Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.
Julio Cortazar
#74. Being alive always seems to be the price of something.
Julio Cortazar
#75. I am I, I am he. We are, but I am I, first I am I, I will defend being I until I am unable to fight any longer. I am I, Atalia. Ego. Yo. A professional degree, an Argentine, a scarlet fingernail, pretty sometimes, big dark eyes, I. Atalia Donosi, I. Yo. Yo-yo, windlass and hawser. Funny.
Julio Cortazar
#76. One of the many ways of contesting level-zero, and one of the best, is to take photographs, an activity in which one should start becoming adept very early in life, teach it to children since it requires discipline, aesthetic education, a good eye and steady fingers.
Julio Cortazar
#77. [Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.
Julio Cortazar
#78. Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.
Julio Cortazar
#79. Why don't we go out instead of talking about people? We seem to be ghosts talking about other ghosts. It's unhealthy." "Yes,
Julio Cortazar
#80. Now that I think about it, it seems to me that's what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.
Julio Cortazar
#81. Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Julio Cortazar
#82. One begins to go about with the sluggish step of a philosopher or a clochard, as more and more vital gestures become reduced to mere instincts of preservation, to a conscience more alert not to be deceived than to grasp truth.
Julio Cortazar
#83. The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
Julio Cortazar
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