Julio Cortázar quotes

Julio Cortázar was an Argentine writer and translator, considered one of the most innovative authors of 20th-century literature. His experimental novels and short stories challenged conventional narrative forms and inspired generations of readers and writers. He played a key role in the Latin American literary "boom" and left a lasting mark on world literature. Here are 34 of his quotes:

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Julio Cortázar

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

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

Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny... it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.

Julio Cortázar

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

Julio Cortázar

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

Julio Cortázar

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

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

Julio Cortázar

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

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

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

Julio Cortázar

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

Julio Cortázar

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

Now it happens that turtles are great speed enthusiasts, which is natural. The esperanzas know that and don't bother themselves about it. The famas know it, and make fun of it. The cronopios know it, and each time they meet a turtle, they haul out the box of colored chalks, and on the rounded blackboard of the turtle's shell they draw a swallow.

Julio Cortázar

The snail lives the way I like to live; he carries his own home with him.

Julio Cortázar

The only true exile is the writer who lives in his own country.

Julio Cortázar

What we call absurd is our ignorance.

Julio Cortázar

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.

Julio Cortázar

We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.

Julio Cortázar

(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.

Julio Cortázar

I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.

Julio Cortázar

Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.

Julio Cortázar