Quotes of Julio Cortazar – Julio Cortazar was an argentinian novellist and essayist that lived from 1914 to 1984.
As several others of the famous writers from Latin America he was strongly inspired by magic realism as well as surrealism.
Julio Cortazar is known as one of the founders of the Latin American Bloom.
Here you will find some of the best Julio Cortazar quotes. If we are missing any, then please comment them below!
- “(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.”
- “After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.”
- “All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
Julio Cortazar Love Quotes
- “Come sleep with me: We won’t make Love. Love will make us.”
- “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.”
- “What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. 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. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the siteoppo. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert.”
Julio Cortazar Quotes on Litterature
- “Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.”
- “When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.”
- “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?”
- “The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.”
- “The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.”
- “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.”
- “I have the feeling that there is less distance between what we call the fantastic and what we call the real. These days, my notion of the fantastic is to what we call reality. Perhaps because reality approaches the fantastic more and more.”
Best Quotes of Julio Cortazar
- “Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.”
- “We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”
- “The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death’s best weapons.”
- “The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.”
- “In quoting others, we cite ourselves.”
- “Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.”
- “Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature”
- “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.”
- “Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.”
Last quotes from Julio Cortazar
- “Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.”
- “Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.”
- “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.”
- “I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.”
- “I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.”
- “Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.”
- “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?”
Video about Julio Cortazar
A bit about Julio Cortazar
Name: Julio Florencio Cortázar
Born: 26 August 1914
Died: 12 February 1984
Occupation: Writer, Teacher, Translator
Awards: Prix Médicis (1974), Rubén Dario Order of Cultural Independence (1983)
