Julio Cortazar Quotes

48 quotes in 785 categories

• 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…
• Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
• The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.
• Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
• 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…
• There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them at the aquarium at the Jardin des…
• Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.
• When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
• Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.
• The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.
• I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.
• The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death's best weapons.
• [Heaven is] that moment in which something attains its maximum depth, its maximum reach, its maximum sense, and becomes completely uninteresting.
• After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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,…
• 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…
• In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
• Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

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