Julio Cortazar Quotes

Books are a narcotic.

Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.

Confucianism strongly condemned the use of drugs like opium.

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

The Batoka of these parts are very degraded in their appearance, and are not likely to improve, either physically or mentally, while so much addicted to smoking the mutokwane ('Cannabis sativa'). They like its narcotic effects

China has come a long way from being a nation of opium addicts to the status of a global power

In the United States, at least one druggist out of every ten exists by means of profits from the sale of habit-forming drugs, of which, of course, opium and its derivatives are most important.

Uncle Sam is the Worst Drug Fiend in the World Of all the nations of the world the United States consumes most habit-forming drugs per capita. Opium, the most pernicious drug known to humanity, is surrounded, in this country, with far fewer safeguards than any other nation.

Your Majesty has not before been thus officially notified, and you may plead ignorance of the severity of our laws, but I now give my assurance that we mean to cut this harmful drug forever.

Opium has a harm. Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality. It is prohibited by law. However, recently the purchasers, eaters, and consumers of opium have become numerous. Deceitful merchants buy and sell it to gain profit. … If we confine our search for opium to the seaports, we fear the search will not be sufficiently thorough. We should also order the general commandant of the police and police - censors at the five gates to prohibit opium and to search for it at all gates. If they capture any violators, they should immediately punish them and should destroy the opium at once. As to Kwangtung and Fukien, the provinces from which opium comes, we order their viceroys, governors, and superintendents of the maritime customs to conduct a thorough search for opium, and cut off its supply. They should in no way … allow opium to be smuggled out.

When I'm sitting in my hotel room, I'm reading. If I've got some time after class, I'm reading. If I can get away with it while I'm doing treatment, I'm reading.

In my schoolboy reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and secondhand dreams.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

Next to a shot of some good, habit-forming narcotic, there is nothing like travelling alone as a 'builder-upper.

The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.

Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death.

How do you tell a valuable French book?' 'First there are the pictures. Then it is a question of the quality of the pictures. Then it is the binding. If a book is good, the owner will have it bound properly. All books in English are bound, but bound badly. There is no way of judging them.

What should a good children’s book be like? If you ask me, I can tell you after thinking long and hard: It must be good.

These books have not made George nobler or better or more truly wise. It is just that he likes listening to their voices, the one or the other, acording to his mood. He misuses them quite ruthlessly - despite the respectful way he has to talk about them in public - to put him to bed, to take his mind off the hands of the clock, to relax the nagging of his pyloric spasm, to gossip him out of his melancholy, to trigger the conditioned reflexes of his colon.

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.

That's what opium does to suffering: makes it of hypothetical interest only.

There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

It is so very easy and so very pleasant, too, to read only books which lead to nothing, light and interesting books, and the more the better, that it is almost as difficult to wean ourselves from it as from the habit of chewing tobacco to excess, or of smoking the whole time, or of depending for stimulus upon tea or coffee or spirits.