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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 Cortazar

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Julio Cortazar
Age: 69 †
Born: 1914
Born: August 26
Died: 1984
Died: February 12
Author
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
Elsene
Julio Denis
Jules Cortazar
Jules Florencio Cortázar
Julio Cortazar
Mind
Compass
Symbol
Hopscotch
Searching
Compasses
Motive
Emblem
Symbols
Destroyer
Realized
Emblems
Night
Destroyers
Nothing
Motives

More quotes by Julio Cortazar

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I can't think of another writer who can move me as surreptitiously as Vian does
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Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
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Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.
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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.
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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.
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After the age of 50 we begin to die little by little in the deaths of others.
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We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
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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.
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The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.
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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.
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I'm such a jerk it had never occurred to me that when we look at a photo from the front, the eyes reproduce exactly the position and the vision of the lens it's these things that are taken for granted and it never occurs to anyone to think about them.
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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 Cortazar
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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.
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Skill alone cannot teach or produce a great short story, which condenses the obsession of the creature it is a hallucinatory presence manifest from the first sentence to fascinate the reader, to make him lose contact with the dull reality that surrounds him, submerging him in another that is more intense and compelling.
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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 Cortazar
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Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape.
Julio Cortazar
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But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
Julio Cortazar
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Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
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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 Cortazar
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Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
Julio Cortazar