The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Julio Cortázar

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.

Poetry, Play, Sometimes

Julio Cortázar

Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.

literature-quotes, moon, poetry

Julio Cortázar

Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface.

criticism, critics

Julio Cortázar

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.

criticism, critics, enthusiasm, idiocy

Julio Cortázar

The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves.

Julio Cortázar

Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.

Julio Cortázar

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

Julio Cortázar

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

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

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.

fate, love, relationship

Julio Cortázar

Explanation is a well-dressed error.

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.

20th-century, absurdity, anthropocentrism, belief, macro, micro, scale, science