Julio Cortazar Quotes

The only possible paradises are those we have lost

All play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

Utopia means elsewhere.

I'm always sad to leave paradise, but I leave behind the hopes of coming again soon.

If we were capable of thinking of everything, we would still be living in Eden, rent-free with all-you-can-eat buffets and infinitely better daytime TV programming.

Even if we should find another Eden, we would not be fit to enjoy it perfectly nor stay in it forever.

Remember, once more how our world should be. And please, don't forget, please, please don't forget.

Utopias rest on the fallacy that perfection is a legitimate goal of human existence.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

Paradise does not exist, but we must nonetheless strive to be worthy of it.

Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed.

Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary.

Without the Utopians of other times, men would still live in caves, miserable and naked. It was Utopians who traced the lines of the first City.....Out of generous dreams come beneficial realities. Utopia is the principle of all progress, and the essay into a better future.

In a better world we will find our young years and our old friends.

If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there'd be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.

Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality.

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

If the world were a paradise of luxury and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or there would be wars, massacres, and murders; so that in the end mankind would inflict more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

How could she feel nostalgia when he was right in front of her? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present? You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more.

Paradise belonged to the innocent. Which was why it was and would ever remain empty. And that is what makes it a paradise.

When man tries to imagine Paradise on earth, the immediate result is a very respectable Hell.

Men cannot conceive of a state of things so fair that it cannot be realized.

Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.