More Quotes by Julio Cortázar
All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.
In quoting others, we cite ourselves.
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.
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.
I think we all have a little bit of that beautiful madness that keeps us walking when everything around us is so insanely sane.
Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
Human history is the sad result of each one looking out for himself.
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.
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.
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.
