Julio Cortazar

"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."

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Source: Julio Cortazar (2014). “Hopscotch: A Novel”, p.216, Pantheon

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Julio Cortazar

Julio Cortazar

Novelist, Short Story Writer

Julio Cortazar was an Argentine writer known for his innovative narrative techniques and works like 'Hopscotch,' which challenged conventional storytelling.

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Julio Cortazar Novelist, Short Story Writer

"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 siteoppo. 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."

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Julio Cortazar Novelist, Short Story Writer

"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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Julio Cortazar Novelist, Short Story Writer

"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."

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