Julio Cortázar Quotes
“We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.”
“We went around without looking for each other, but knowing we went around to find each other.”
“No other evil we know is faster than Rumor, thriving on speed and becoming stronger by running. Small and timid at first, then borne on a light air, she flits over ground while hiding her head on a cloud-top.”
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, named David Poe Jr. He published his first book, “Tamerlane and Other Poems” (1827). His early …
“I was consumed by a restless curiosity, a thirst for knowing everything in the shortest possible time. This is a side of my character that has prevented me all my life from devoting myself seriously to any one thing.”
“Looking about me, listening and recalling what the day had been like, I suddenly felt a secret unease in my heart and raised my eyes to the sky, but even in the sky there seemed to be no tranquillity. Dotted with stars, it constantly quivered and danced and shivered.”
“Humankind, fleet of life like tree leaves, unsubstantial as shadows, weak creatures of clay, wingless, ephemeral, sorrow worn, and dreamlike.”
“All day long he was docile, intelligent, good, Though sometimes changing to a darker mood. He seemed hypocritical, could tell better lies, in the dark he saw dots of colors behind closed eyes, clenched fists, put his tongue out at his elder brother.”
“United you will be more than a match for your enemies. But if you quarrel and separate, your weakness will put you at the mercy of those who attack you.”
Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics, the study of communication through signs and symbols, at the University of Bologna. Also a philiosopher, a historian, literary critic, and an aesthetician. …
“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.”
“Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.”
“Never stop smiling not even when you’re sad, someone might fall in love with your smile.”
“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
“What are mere pearls when you’ll become the ocean,
And that bright sun with its revolving motion!”
“Imaginary evil is romantic, varied; real evil is dreary, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
“They brought it to a common saying there that the most acceptable service one could render to God was to put the devil in Hell”
“Perhaps it is not-being that is the true state, and all our dream of life is inexistent; but, if so, we feel that these phrases of music, these conceptions which exist in relation to our dream, must be nothing either. We shall perish, but we have as hostages these divine captives who will follow and share our fate. And death in their company is somehow less bitter, less inglorious, perhaps even less probable. ”
“Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”
“The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering.”
Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings…if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.”
“The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one.”
“Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
“It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.”
“In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear!”
“I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can’t help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced. I am going to dream about you the whole night, the whole week, the whole year.”
“Today is the oldest you’ve ever been, and the youngest you’ll ever be again.”
“Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.”
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”
“There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can’t be said.”
“The suffering may be moral or physical; and in my opinion it is just as absurd to call a man a coward who destroys himself, as to call a man a coward who dies of a malignant fever.”
“All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.”
“There are only three failures: not believing, not trying and not going all the way.”
“Time takes it all whether you want it to or not, time takes it all. Time bares it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.”
“Never fall in love with someone that won’t fight for you because when the real battles begin they won’t pull your heart to safety, but they will their own.”
The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things.