Quotes of Julio Cortázar - somelinesforyou

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

- Julio Cortázar

“ Lo que mucha gente llama amar consiste en elegir una mujer y casarse con ella. La eligen, te lo juro, los he visto. Como si se pudiera elegir en el amor, como si no fuera un rayo que te parte los huesos y te deja estaqueado en la mitad del patio. Vos dirás que la eligen porquelaaman, yo creo que es al vesre. A Beatriz no se la elige, a Julieta no se la elige. Vos no elegís la lluvia que te va a calar hasta los huesos cuando salís de un concierto. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ Creo que no te quiero, que solamente quiero la imposibilidad tan obvia de quererte. Como el guante izquierdo enamorado de la mano derecha. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ Lo que mucha gente llama amar consiste en elegir una mujer y casarse con ella. La eligen, te lo juro, los he visto. Como si se pudiera elegir en el amor, como si no fuera un rayo que te parte los huesos y te deja estaqueado en la mitad del patio. Vos dirás que la eligen porquelaaman, yo creo que es al vesre. A Beatriz no se la elige, a Julieta no se la elige. Vos no elegís la lluvia que te va a calar hasta los huesos cuando salís de un concierto. ”

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

“ Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ 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 Cortázar

“ Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa. ”

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

“ All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ 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. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature; it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film. I don’t want to write anything but takes. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice. ”

- Julio Cortázar

“ 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 Cortázar

“ 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 Cortázar

“ In quoting others, we cite ourselves. ”

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

“ 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). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe. ”

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar

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

- Julio Cortázar
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