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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #29010
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #62765
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #75520
#4. Habits, Andrea, are concrete forms of rhythm, are that portion of rhythm which helps to keep us alive.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #96107
#5. I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #121918
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #131766
#7. Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #141412
#8. I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #147988
#9. I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all
directions ...

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #203132
#10. And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #233552
#11. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #274554
#12. We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #310718
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #349695
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #356224
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #381233
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #414383
#17. When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #415427
#18. After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #432621
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #440028
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #443938
#21. Explanation is a well-dressed error.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #504979
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #549336
#23. Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #551773
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #552616
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #562027
#26. Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #562776
#27. Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #588913
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #617900
#29. Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #624865
#30. The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #653465
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #741860
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #750630
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #796120
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #840093
#35. Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #866657
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #913371
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #930974
#38. The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #932182
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #953685
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #993015
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #998838
#42. In quoting others, we cite ourselves.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1016262
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1052040
#44. The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1061676
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1073460
#46. Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1084981
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1129517
#48. If I were a moviemaker I'd set about hunting sunsets.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1149240
#49. On top of physical pain like a metaphysical pinprick, writing abounds.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1156819
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1164746
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1207364
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1208085
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1226415
#54. And there's blues in my bed, 'cause l'm sleepin' by myself.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1252437
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1252901
#56. Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1276458
#57. What we call absurd is our ignorance. The Winners, 1960

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1324766
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1327562
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1335896
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1341510
#61. Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1379806
#62. Six months ago. Six, sax, sex.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1391639
#63. Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1408287
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1408950
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1448162
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1478242
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1492316
#68. All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1493754
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1522086
#70. The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1550394
#71. Now I am an axolotl.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1556403
#72. (memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1607007
#73. Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1608621
#74. Being alive always seems to be the price of something.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1627697
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1686350
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1697841
#77. [Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1700187
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1719806
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1734449
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1745090
#81. Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1748652
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1844464
#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

Julio Cortazar Quotes #1855750

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