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We Know That Attention Acts As A Lightning Rod. Merely By Concentrating On Something One Causes Endless Analogies To Collect Around It, Even Penetrate The Boundaries Of The Subject Itself: An Experience That We Call Coincidence, Serendipity – The Terminology Is Extensive. My Experience Has Been That In These Circular Travels What Is Really Significant Surrounds A Central Absence, An Absence That, Paradoxically, Is The Text Being Written Or To Be Written.

-Julio Cortazar

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We Know That Attention

Julio Cortazar

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We Know That Attention Acts As A Lightning Rod. Merely By Concentrating On Something One Causes Endless Analogies To Collect Around It, Even Penetrate The Boundaries Of The Subject Itself: An Experience That We Call Coincidence, Serendipity – The Terminology Is Extensive. My Experience Has Been That In These Circular Travels What Is Really Significant Surrounds A Central Absence, An Absence That, Paradoxically, Is The Text Being Written Or To Be Written.

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I Think We All Have A Little Bit Of That Beautiful Madness That Keeps Us Walking When Everything Around Us Is So Insanely Sane.

I Think It Is Vanity To Want To Put Into A Story Anything But The Story Itself.

Once In A While It Happens That I Vomit Up A Bunny... It's Not Reason For One To Blush And Isolate Oneself And To Walk Around Keeping One's Mouth Shut.

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.

Happy Was She Who Could Believe Without Seeing, Who Was At One With The Duration And Continuity Of Life.

Continuity Of Life

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.

One Of The Many Ways Of Contesting Level-zero, And One Of The Best, Is To Take Photographs, An Activity In Which One Should Start Becoming Adept Very Early In Life, Teach It To Children Since It Requires Discipline, Aesthetic Education, A Good Eye And Steady Fingers.

I Can't Think Of Another Writer Who Can Move Me As Surreptitiously As Vian Does

Everything Can Be Killed Except Nostalgia For The Kingdom, We Carry It In The Color Of Our Eyes, In Every Love Affair, In Everything That Deeply Torments And Unties And Tricks.

When One Wants To Write, One Writes. If One Is Condemned To Write, One Writes.

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.

The Mysterious Does Not Spell Itself Out In Capital Letters, As Many Writers Believe, But Is Always Between, An Interstice.

I'm Such A Jerk; It Had Never Occurred To Me That When We Look At A Photo From The Front, The Eyes Reproduce Exactly The Position And The Vision Of The Lens; It's These Things That Are Taken For Granted And It Never Occurs To Anyone To Think About Them.

Memory Is A Mirror That Scandalously Lies.

The Modern Story Begun, One Might Say, With Edgar Allan Poe, Which Proceeds Inexorably, Like A Machine Destined To Accomplish Its Mission With The Maximum Economy Of Means.

Why Have We Had To Invent Eden, To Live Submerged In The Nostalgia Of A Lost Paradise, To Make Up Utopias, Propose A Future For Ourselves?

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The Unusual Is Only Found In A Very Small Percentage, Except In Literary Creations, And That Is Exactly What Makes Literature.

Wordplay Hides A Key To Reality That The Dictionary Tries In Vain To Lock Inside Every Free Word.

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All Profound Distraction Opens Certain Doors. You Have To Allow Yourself To Be Distracted When You Are Unable To Concentrate.

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Where Are The Beginnings, The Endings, And Most Important, The Middles?

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We No Longer Believe Because It Is Absurd: It Is Absurd Because We Must Believe.

There Was A Time When I Thought A Great Deal About The Axolotls. I Went To See Them At The Aquarium At The Jardin Des Plantes And Stayed For Hours Watching Them, Observing Their Immobility; Their Faint Movements. Now I Am An Axolotl.

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.

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Now That I Think About It, It Seems To Me That’s What Idiocy Is: The Ability To Be Enthusiastic All The Time About Anything You Like, So That A Drawing On The Wall Does Not Have To Be Diminished By The Memory Of The Frescoes Of Giotto In Padua.

Salt And The Center Of The World Have To Be There, In That Spot On The Tablecloth.

I Realized That Searching Was My Symbol, The Emblem Of Those Who Go Out At Night With Nothing In Mind, The Motives Of A Destroyer Of Compasses.

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Literature Is ... A Game, But It's A Game One Can Put One's Life Into.

Only By Living Absurdly Is It Possible To Break Out Of This Infinite Absurdity.

I Raised The Camera, Pretended To Study A Focus Which Did Not Include Them, And Waited And Watched Closely, Sure That I Would Finally Catch The Revealing Expression, One That Would Sum It All Up, Life That Is Rhythmed By Movement But Which A Stiff Image Destroys, Taking Time In Cross Section, If We Do Not Choose The Essential Imperceptible Fraction Of It.

The Novel Wins By Points, The Short Story By Knockout.

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(memory Is) A Strange Echo, Which Stores Its Replicas According To Some Other Acoustic Than Consciousness Or Expectation.

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Human History Is The Sad Result Of Each One Looking Out For Himself.

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In Quoting Others, We Cite Ourselves.

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