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.
The serious people who took him seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china.
When thought is in bondage the truth is hidden, for everything is murky and unclear, and the burdensome practice of judging brings annoyance and weariness. What benefit can be derived from distinctions and separations?
If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.
Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.
I am that prodigal son who wasted all the portion entrusted to me by my father. But I have not yet fallen at my father's knees. I have not yet begun to put away from me the enticements of my former riotous living.
The gospel is like a caged lion,' said the great baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. 'It does not need to be defended, it simply needs to be let out of it's cage' Today, the cage is our accommodation to the secular/sacred split that reduces Christianity to a matter of personal belief. To unlock the cage, we need to become utterly convinced that, as Francis Schaeffer said, Christianity is not merely religious truth, it is total truth- truth about the whole of reality.
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