Julio Cortázar quotes

„In quoting others, we cite ourselves.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

„Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

„Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Source: Hopscotch

„Now I am an axolotl.“

—  Julio Cortázar

Source: Blow-Up and Other Stories

„We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

„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.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Source: Hopscotch

„You look at me, you look at me closely, each time closer and then we play cyclops, we look at each other closer each time and our eyes grow, they grow closer, they overlap and the cyclops look at each other, breathing confusion, their mouths find each other and fight warmly, biting with their lips, resting their tongues lightly on their teeth, playing in their caverns where the heavy air comes and goes with the scent of an old perfume and silence. Then my hands want to hide in your hair, slowly stroke the depth of your hair while we kiss with mouths full of flowers or fish, of living movements, of dark fragrance. And if we bite each other, the pain is sweet, and if we drown in a short and terrible surge of breath, that instant death is beauty. And there is a single saliva and a single flavour of ripe fruit, and I can feel you shiver against me like a moon on the water.“

—  Julio Cortázar

„Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.“

—  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, book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

„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 Cortázar

„Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

„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.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Source: Hopscotch

„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 Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Source: Hopscotch

„We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Original: (gl) 'Andábamos sin buscarnos pero sabiendo que andábamos para encontrarnos.'
Source: Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963), Chapter 1.

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

—  Julio Cortázar, book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

Source: Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

„Once in a while it happens that I vomit up a bunny… it's not reason for one to blush and isolate oneself and to walk around keeping one's mouth shut.“

—  Julio Cortázar

Source: Blow-Up and Other Stories

„Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Nada está perdido si se tiene el valor de proclamar que todo está perdido y hay que empezar de nuevo.
Source: Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963), Chapter 71.

„"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")


To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.


Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.


The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.


Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.


But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.“

—  Julio Cortázar

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

„I touch your mouth, I touch the edge of your mouth with my finger, I am drawing it as if it were something my hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little, and all I have to do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time I can make the mouth I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face, and which by some chance that I do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.“

—  Julio Cortázar, book Hopscotch

Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963)