Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Julio CortazarRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote expresses the transformative power of love and perception, highlighting how deep feelings can alter one's view of reality.
In this quote, Julio Cortazar illustrates the profound impact of love on one's perception of the world. The speaker describes their kisses as having the ability to unlock new perspectives, suggesting that love transcends ordinary experiences and allows for a more profound understanding of existence. The imagery of a 'dizzy pilot' navigating through 'the water of time' further emphasizes how love can create a sense of freedom and escapism, enabling one to redefine their relationship with both time and reality.
Themes
LovePerceptionTransformationRealityExperience
In practice
Example use cases
In a romantic poem reading at a wedding, one might reference this quote to illustrate how love changes our view of life.
More from Julio Cortazar
All quotes →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 don’t want to write anything but takes.
Julio CortazarRead
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Julio CortazarRead
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.
Julio CortazarRead
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.
Julio CortazarRead
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.
Julio CortazarRead
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Maybe the purchasing and the making and the wrapping and the decorating - those delightfully generous and important expressions of our love at Christmas - should be separated, if only slightly, from the more quiet, personal moments when we consider the meaning of the Baby (and his birth) who prompts the giving of such gifts.
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I’m here not because I am supposed to be here, or because I’m trapped here, but because I’d rather be with you than anywhere else in the world.
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