Top 40 Julio Cortázar Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Julio Cortázar

2. “Si te caes te levanto y sino me acuesto contigo.”

— Julio Cortázar

3. “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

4. “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 Cortázar

5. “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 Cortázar

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6. “In quoting others, we cite ourselves.”

— Julio Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

8. “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 Cortázar

9. “The novel wins by points, the short story by knockout.”

— Julio Cortázar

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10. “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 Cortázar

11. “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 Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

13. “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 Cortázar

14. “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 Cortázar

15. “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 Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility; their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.”

— Julio Cortázar

16. “The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death’s best weapons.”

— Julio Cortázar

17. “Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.”

— Julio Cortázar

18. “When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.”

— Julio Cortázar

19. “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 Cortázar

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20. “Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the middles?”

— Julio Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

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 Cortázar

23. “I can’t think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does.”

— Julio Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

26. “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 Cortázar

27. “The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.”

— Julio Cortázar

28. “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

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29. “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 Cortázar

30. “Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.”

— Julio Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

32. “After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.”

— Julio Cortázar

33. “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 Cortázar

34. “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 Cortázar

35. “We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”

— Julio Cortázar

36. “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

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

— Julio Cortázar

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

— Julio Cortázar

39. “Salt and the center of the world have to be there, in that spot on the tablecloth.”

— Julio Cortázar

40. “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 Cortázar