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Works translated into English:
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Julio Cortázar
| Quotes from Hopscotch
"Our possible truth must be an invention, that is to say, scripture literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisci culture, all the tures in this world. Values, tures, sainthood, a ture, society, a ture, love, pure ture, beauty, a ture of tures." (384) "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." (381) "Let us try to invent new passions, or to reproduce the old ones with a like intensity...true belief is somewhere in between superstition and libertinismâ."(401) "Oliveira, the main character: 'The only dangers for me are metaphysical.' " (89) "That with each successive defeat there is an approach towards the final mutation, and that man only is in that he searches to be, plans to be, thumbing through words and modes of behavior and joy sprinkled with blood and other rhetorical pieces like this one."(363) "Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity." (101) "And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?" (160) "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?" "Perhaps Eden, as some would like to see it, is the mythopoetic projection of good old fetal times that persist in the unconscious." "Everything depends upon...(a sentence scratched out)." (360) "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." (459) "...we shall die without ever knowing the real name of the day." "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?" (442) |
| Other Quotes
"No one can retell the plot of a Cortázar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost." “Much of what I have written falls into the category of eccentricity , because I have never admitted a clear distinction between living and writing; if in my life I have managed to disguise an only partial participation in my circumstances, I still cannot deny that eccentricity in what I write, since I write precisely because I am only half there or not there at all. I write by default and dislocation, and since I write out of an interstice I always invite others to discover one of their own and to see for themselves the garden where the trees bear fruits that turn out to be precious stones. The monster remains the same.” "No one can retell the plot of a Cortázar story; each one consists of determined words in a determined order. If we try to summarize them, we realize that something precious has been lost." "The general idea behind Hopscotch , you see, is the proof of a failure and the hope of a victory. But the book doesn't propose any solution; it simply limits itself to showing the possible paths one can take to knock down the wall, to see what's on the other side." “In the case of my books, altering reality is a desire, a hope. But it seems important to point out that my books are not written nor were experienced or conceived under the pretense of changing reality. There are people who write as a contribution to the modification of reality. I know that modifying reality is an infinitely slow and difficult undertaking. My books do not function in that sense. A philosopher develops a philosophical system convinced that it is the truth and will modify reality because he supposes he's right. A sociologist establishes a theory. A politician also pretends to change the world. My case is much more modest.” "'It's like a waiting room, life is,' said the bald gentleman, carefully grinding out his cigarette with his shoe and examining his hands as if he didn't know what to do with them now; the elderly lady sighed a yes born of long years of agreeing, and put away her little bottle just as the door at the end of the corridor opened and the other lady came out with that look all the others envied, and an almost sympathetic goodbye when she got to the exit." |
Quotes Part Three I believe I know how to look at things, if I know anything at all, and that looking always exudes falsehood, for it is what hurls us farthest from ourselves, without the least guarantee. —Blow-Up You can get used to some weird things, get to think that the mystery will explain itself and that you end up living inside the mystery, accepting the unacceptable, saying goodbye in street corners or in cafes when everything could be so simple, a staircase with a glass ball at the bottom of the banister, that leads to the meeting, to the very truth. —Secret Weapons, (259) Now I’m going to think about you, sweetheart, only about you all night. I’m going to think only about you, it’s the only way I’m conscious of myself, to hold you in the center of myself like a tree there, to loosen myself little by little from the trunk, which sustains me and hides me, to float cautiously around you, testing the air with each leaf (green, we are green, I myself and you yourself, trunk full of sap, and green leaves: green, green). —Secret Weapons, (261) That made me jumpy, Bruno, that they felt sure of themselves. Sure of what...you only had to concentrate a little, feel a little, be quiet for a little bit, to find the holes. In the door, in the bed: holes. In the hand, in the newspaper, in time, in the air: everything full of holes, everything spongy, like a colander straining itself... But they were American science, Bruno, dig? White coats were protecting them from the holes; didn’t see anything, they accepted what had been seen by others, they imagined that they were living. And naturally they couldn’t see the holes. —The Pursuer In the end, when I wrote my first fantastic story, I did nothing but intervene personally in an operation that until then had been mere substitution. Another Jules replaced the first with a tangible loss for both. —“On the sense of the fantastic.” In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. p. 28. The world is not limited to external appearances. . . The sense that all reverses deform, multiply, and annul their obverses is natural for those who live for the unexpected. Extreme familiarity with the fantastic leads still further: in a certain sense we have already received what has yet to arrive, the door allows a visitor to pass who will come tomorrow or who came yesterday. The order is always open; one never reaches a conclusion because nothing ever starts or finishes in a system in which we possess only the immediate coordinates. —Julio Cortazar “On the sense of the fantastic.” In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. p. 29. There is no closed fantastic, what we come to know of it is always partial and that is why we think it fantastic. One comes to realize that, as always, words merely plug the gaps. –Julio Cortazar “On the sense of the fantastic.” —In Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. p. 29. Creo que el novelista que sólo vive en un campo de novelas, o el poeta que sólo vive en un campo de poesía, tal vez no sean grandes novelistas ni grandes poetas. Creo en la necesidad de la apertura más amplia. —In "Julio Cortázar, lector"; entrevista por Sara Castro-Klaren; 1976 |