Life & Wisdom Quote by Julio Cortazar

Cortazar stages identity as a kind of clerical error: we’re “this thing” now, stamped and filed by habit, language, and adulthood, but the original version of the self is still out there like a mislaid document. The line’s sly power comes from its refusal to romanticize that earlier state. He doesn’t say we return to purity or truth; he says we “sometimes arrive” at what we were, as if the destination is real but hard to reach, and even then only briefly. The uncertainty in “who knows” punctures any spiritual certainty. It’s a wink at the self-help idea of the “authentic self,” replacing it with something more slippery: identity as an ongoing improvisation that can’t be audited.

The triad - dreams, poetry, play - is doing cultural work. These are the sanctioned zones where logic loosens its grip, where the mind can disobey its own résumé. Cortazar, a key figure of the Latin American Boom, spent his career building exactly those zones: narratives that behave like games, realism that suddenly tilts into the uncanny, sentences that open trapdoors under “normal” perception. The quote reads like a compact manifesto for that aesthetic. Art isn’t decoration; it’s a temporary jailbreak.

Subtextually, “before we were this thing” points at the social manufacturing of personhood: roles, politics, family scripts, the bureaucratic name-tag of adulthood. Cortazar’s genius is to make the escape route feel both exhilarating and suspiciously fragile. You can get back, but only by entering spaces that don’t promise permanence - they promise movement.