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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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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
Time
Watching
Deal
Immobility
Deals
Aquarium
Movement
Aquariums
Went
Faint
Hours
Observing
Thought
Stayed
Great
Movements

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Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
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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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The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.
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We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
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Time is born in the eyes, everybody knows that.
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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?
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.
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