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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the idea that through dreams, art, and imagination, we can reconnect with our true selves beyond societal roles.
Julio Cortazar's quote suggests that in our daily lives, we often become trapped in our identities shaped by society and experience. However, it is in dreams, poetry, and playful moments that we can access a purer sense of self, revealing who we truly are beneath the layers of expectation and reality.
In practice
In a motivational speech about creativity, one might share this quote to encourage others to explore their imagination.
La Maga did not know that my kisses were like eyes which began to open up beyond her, and that I went along outside as if I saw a different concept of the world, the dizzy pilot of a black prow which cut the water of time and negated it.
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
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 donβt want to write anything but takes.
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
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.
You're like a witness. You're the one who goes to the museum and looks at the paintings. I mean the paintings are there and you're in the museum too, near and far away at the same time. I'm a painting. Rocamadour is a painting. Etienne is a painting, this room is a painting. You think that you're in the room but you're not. You're looking at the room, you're not in the room.
I don't see a lot of narratives written where a woman who looks like me gets to be beautiful and sexualized and upwardly mobile, middle-class, funny, quirky. They're very seldom written.
The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.
All life is energy and we are transmitting it at every moment. We are all little beaming little signals like radio frequencies, and the world is responding in kind.
An Adult faith does not follow the waves of fashion and the latest novelties.
Unless you see yourself standing there with the shrieking crowd, full of hostility and hatred for the holy and innocent Lamb of God, you donβt really understand the nature and depth of your sin or the necessity of the cross.
Listen; this world is the lunatic's sphere , _x000D_ Don't always agree it's real, _x000D_ Even with my feet upon it And the postman knowing my door _x000D_ My address is somewhere else.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.