"Andábamos sin buscarnos, pero sabiendo que andábamos para encontrarnos"
— Julio Cortázar (Rayuela)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch)

"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

"Now I am an axolotl."
— Julio Cortázar (Blow-Up: And Other Stories)

"Para leer en forma interrogativa

Has visto
verdaderamente has visto
la nieve los astros los pasos afelpados de la brisa
Has tocado
de verdad has tocado
el plato el pan la cara de esa mujer que tanto amas
Has vivido
como un golpe en la frente
el instante el jadeo la caída la fuga
Has sabido
con cada poro de la piel sabido
que tus ojos tus manos tu sexo tu blando corazón
había que tirarlos
había que llorarlos
había que inventarlos otra vez.

"
— 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 (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"Nunca se lo había explicado antes, no crea que por deslealtad, pero naturalmente uno no va a ponerse a explicarle a la gente que de cuando en cuando vomita un conejito. Como siempre me ha sucedido estando a solas, guardaba el hecho igual que se guardan tantas constancias de lo que acaece (o hace uno acaecer) en la privacía total. No me lo reproche, Andrée, no me lo reproche. De cuando en cuando me ocurre vomitar un conejito. No es razón para no vivir en cualquier casa, no es razón para que uno tenga que avergonzarse y estar aislado y andar callándose."
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

""Pero el amor, esa palabra... Moralista Horacio, temeroso de pasiones sin una razón de aguas hondas, desconcertado y arisco en la ciudad donde el amor se llama con todos los nombres de todas las calles, de todas las casas, de todos los pisos, de todas las habitaciones, de todas las camas, de todos los sueños, de todos los olvidos o los recuerdos. Amor mío, no te quiero por vos ni por mí ni por los dos juntos, no te quiero porque la sangre me llame a quererte, te quiero porque no sos mía, porque estás del otro lado, ahí donde me invitás a saltar y no puedo dar el salto, porque en lo más profundo de la posesión no estás en mí, no te alcanzo, no paso de tu cuerpo, de tu risa, hay horas en que me atormenta que me ames (cómo te gusta usar el verbo amar, con qué cursilería lo vas dejando caer sobre los platos y las sábanas y los autobuses), me atormenta tu amor que no me sirve de puente porque un puente no se sostiene de un solo lado... "

J. Cortazar. "Rayuela" 93"
— Julio Cortázar

"In quoting others, we cite ourselves."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"One begins to go about with the sluggish step of a philosopher or a clochard, as more and more vital gestures become reduced to mere instincts of preservation, to a conscience more alert not to be deceived than to grasp truth."
— Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch)

"Las costumbres, Andrée, son formas concretas del ritmo, son la cuota de ritmo que nos ayuda a vivir."
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"(memory is) A strange echo, which stores its replicas according to some other acoustic than consciousness or expectation.
"
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"The archive of supposed photocopies (I.E. memory) actually offers up strange creatures; the green paradise of childhood loves that Baudelaire recalled is for many a future in reverse, an obverse of hope in the face of the gray purgatory of adult loves."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight against it, it inhabits them, it is their familiar and their succubus. Why write, if everything has, in a way, already been said? Gide observed sardonically that since nobody listened, everything has to be said again, yet a suspicion of guilt and superfluity leads the European intellectual to the most extreme refinements of his trade and tools, the only way to avoid paths too much traveled. Thus the enthusiasm that greets novelties, the uproar when a writer has succeeded in giving substance to a new slice of the invisible; merely recall symbolism, surrealism, the ‘nouveau roman’: finally something truly new that neither Ronsard, nor Stendahl , nor Proust imagined. For a moment we can put aside our guilt; even the epigones begin too believe they are doing something new. Afterwards, slowly, they begin to feel European again and each writer still has his albatross around his neck."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"(...) para pessoas como ela, o mistério começava exatamente com a explicação."
— Julio Cortázar (Rayuela)

"Nesse tempo, já me dera conta de que procurar era minha sina, emblema de todos aqueles que saem à noite sem qualquer finalidade exata, razão de todos os destruidores de bússolas."
— Julio Cortázar (Rayuela)

"Já acreditara alguma vez no amor como enriquecimento, como exaltação das potências intercessoras. Certo dia, deu-se conta de que seus amores eram impuros porque pressupunham essa esperança, enquanto o verdadeiro amante amava sem esperar o que quer que fosse fora do amor, aceitando cegamente que o dia se tornasse mais azul e a noite mais doce e o bonde menos incômodo. 'Até da sopa eu faço uma operação dialética', pensou Oliveira. Suas amantes acabavam sempre se tornando suas amigas, cúmplices numa contemplação especial das circunstâncias. As mulheres começavam sempre por adorá-lo (ele era verdadeiramente hadorado por elas), por admirá-lo (uma hadmiração hilimitada). depois algo as fazia suspeitar do vazio, recuavam e ele lhes facilitava a fuga, abria-lhes a porta para que fossem brincar em outro lugar. em duas ocasiões, estivera a ponto de sentir certa piedade e de lhes deixar a ilusão de que o compreendiam, mas algo lhe dissera que sua piedade não era autêntica, era antes um recurso barato do seu egoísmo e do seu tédio
e dos seu hábitos. 'A Piedade está em liquidação', dizia Oliveira, e deixava que elas fossem embora, se esquecia delas muito rapidamente."
— Julio Cortázar (Rayuela)

"In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small)."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"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 (Hopscotch)

"Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life."
— Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch)

"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 Cortázar (Hopscotch)

"3+3 son 6 y el que cuenta."
— Julio Cortázar

"¿Por qué tan lejos de los dioses? Quizá por preguntarlo. ¿Y qué? El hombre es el animal que pregunta. El día en que verdaderamente sepamos preguntar, habrá diálogo. Por ahora las preguntas nos alejan vertiginosamente de las respuestas. ¿Qué epifanía podemos esperar si nos estamos ahogando en la más falsa de las libertades, la dialéctica judeocristiana? Nos hace falta un Novum Organum de verdad, hay que abrir de par en par todas las ventanas y tirar todo a la calle, pero sobre todo hay que tirar también la ventana, y nosotros con ella. Es la muerte, o salir volando. Hay que hacerlo, de alguna manera hay que hacerlo."
— Julio Cortázar

"... yo creo que las mujeres tejen cuando han encontrado en esa labor el gran pretexto para no hacer nada."
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

"Me pregunto que hubiera hecho Irene sin el tejido. Uno puede releer un libro, pero cuando un pullover está terminado no se puede repetirlo sin escándalo."
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

"Pero no le escribo por eso, esta carta se la envío a causa de los conejitos, me parece justo enterarla; y porque me gusta escribir cartas, y tal vez porque llueve. "
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

"Alzan la tibia cabeza hacia las lámparas del salón, los tres soles inmóviles de su día, ellos que aman la luz porque su noche no tiene luna ni estrellas ni faroles. "
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

"... no es nominalismo, no es magia, solamente que las cosas no se pueden variar así de pronto, a veces las cosas viran brutalmente y cuando usted esperaba la bofetada a la derecha. "
— Julio Cortázar (Bestiario)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"All established order forms a line of resistance against the threat of rupture and places its meager forces at the service of continuity. That everything should continue as usual is the bourgeois standard of a reality that is indeed bourgeois precisely because it is a standard."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"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 Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"“Abrazado a la Maga, esa concreción de nebulosa, pienso que tanto sentido tiene hacer un muñequito con miga de pan como escribir la novela que nunca escribiré o defender con la vida las ideas que redimen a los pueblos.”"
— Julio Cortázar

"Anyone who finds himself incapable of grasping the complexities of a work hides his withdrawal behind the most superficial pretext because he has not gotten past the surface."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.

I don’t want to write anything but takes."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred million men march in step in a parody of order."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice."
— Julio Cortázar (Around the Day in Eighty Worlds)

"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."
— Julio Cortázar