Quotes from Julio Cortazar

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.

A short story relies on those values that make poetry and jazz what they are: tension, rhythms, inner beat, into unforeseen within foreseen parameters

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.

Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.

Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.

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.

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?

Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.

Literature is ... a game, but it's a game one can put one's life into.

Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.

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.

Creo que todos tenemos un poco de esa bella locura que nos mantiene andando cuando todo alrededor es tan insanamente cuerdo.

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.

And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?

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...

Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.

nos queríamos en una dialéctica de imán y limadura, de ataque y defensa, de pelota y pared.

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.

Buscás eso que llamas la armonía, pero la buscás justo ahí donde acabás de decir que no está, entre los amigos, la familia, en la ciudad...

Cómo podía yo sospechar que aquello que parecía tan mentira era verdadero...

We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.

Cuando llovía me entraba el agua hasta el alma