A day like today would’ve been Julio Cortázar’s 100th birthday. The Argentine novelist, short story writer and essayist was born August 26, 1914, and with his writing, he influenced an entire generation of Spanish-speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe. He has been called both a "modern master of the short story" and “the Simón Bolívar of the novel,” by Carlos Fuentes. Cortázar wrote numerous short stories, collected in volumes as Bestiario (1951), Final del juego (1956), and Las armas secretas (1959).
Cortázar published four novels during his lifetime: Los premios (The Winners, 1960), Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963), 62: A Model Kit (62 Modelo para Armar, 1968), and Libro de Manuel (A Manual for Manuel, 1973). Two other novels, El examen and Divertimiento, though written before 1960, only appeared posthumously. Today we honor him with 11 of his most memorable quotes.
“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.”
“Come sleep with me: We won't make Love,Love will make us.”
“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.”
“In quoting others, we cite ourselves.”
“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.”
“What most people call loving consists of picking out a woman and marrying her. They pick her out, I swear, I’ve seen them. 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. They probably say that they pick her out because-they-love-her, I think it’s just the opposite. Beatrice wasn’t picked out, Juliet wasn’t picked out. You don’t pick out the rain that soaks you to a skin when you come out of a concert.”
“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.”
“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...”
“Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.”
“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?”
“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.”
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