Love Quote by Julio Cortazar

Nothing in Cortazar lands gently, and this line is no exception: it makes nostalgia sound less like a mood than a parasite with perfect survival instincts. “Everything can be killed” opens with a blunt, almost political confidence in endings - as if experience, desire, even memory can be cut off cleanly. Then he pivots: except this one thing, “nostalgia for the kingdom,” an image that refuses to behave like ordinary longing. It isn’t sentimental homesickness; it’s metaphysical exile. The “kingdom” suggests a place that may never have existed in history but persists as a felt truth: a lost order, a prior wholeness, an original intensity.

Cortazar’s intent is to show how that ache hides inside the body and masquerades as biography. “We carry it in the color of our eyes” collapses metaphysics into genetics, implying the longing is congenital, not chosen. Then he threads it through “every love affair,” exposing romance as one of nostalgia’s clever disguises. We don’t only want another person; we want the door they might open back into the kingdom.

The syntax does the real work: “torments and unties and tricks” keeps piling verbs like waves, refusing closure, mimicking the way longing keeps changing shape. “Unties” hints at disintegration - nostalgia loosens the knots that hold a stable self together. “Tricks” turns the emotion into a con artist: it promises reunion, delivers repetition. In Cortazar’s Latin American modernist context - steeped in displacement, fractured identity, and the surreal adjacent-to-real - nostalgia isn’t a soft focus filter. It’s an engine of desire, the fuel of art, and a condition you can’t outgrow because it’s busy writing you.