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.
Freedom is not the ability to do anything we want, whenever we want. Rather, FREEDOM is the ability to live responsibly the truth of our relationship with God and with one another.
In so far as men are influenced by envy or any kind of hatred, one towards another, they are at variance, and are therefore to be feared in proportion, as they are more powerful than their fellows._x000D_ _x000D_ Yet minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
People do not give from the top of their purses but from the bottom of their hearts. If you desire to become a more generous person do not change your income. Change your heart.
A lot of jobs don't allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
The fortune my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom.
The only proper intoxication is conversation.
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