Caillois Roger Quotes & Sayings

In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature. — Roger Caillois

It should be particularly stressed that the fantastic makes no sense in an out-and-out strange world. To imagine the fantastic in it is even impossible. In a world full of marvels the extraordinary loses its power. — Roger Caillois

Life appears: a complex dampness, destined to an intricate future and charged with secret virtues, capable of challenge and creation. A kind of precarious slime, of surface mildew, in which a ferment is already working. A turbulent, spasmodic sap, a presage and expectation of a new way of being, breaking with mineral perpetuity and boldly exchanging it for the doubtful privilege of being able to tremble, decay, and multiply. — Roger Caillois

I was asked to be on 'The Colbert Report' last year as Big Bird and Oscar. But when we got there, we discovered they wanted both characters on at the same time. Stephen Colbert didn't know one man plays them both. We called Joey Mazzarino, our head writer, who's a very good puppeteer as well. He agreed to zip over and do Oscar. — Caroll Spinney

She was not who she wanted to be. And not only did she not know how to make herself over into someone else, she wasn't even sure who she wanted to become. — Sharon Shinn

The fantastic is always a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality — Roger Caillois

Bonner leans his forehead against hers. Zig when they think you'll zag. Creation's Rule Number Two.
What's Number One? Els asks, willing to be this bent soul's straight man.
Zag when they think you'll zig. — Richard Powers

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius. — James Russell Lowell

I think there's only one sensible place for a person to be at 5:30 in the morning. That's in bed. And what am I doing? I'm out running. And I completely hate this. — Derek Clayton

To me, I think it's awesome to meet your heroes and find out who they are and where they came from and what made them choose to communicate in the form that connected with you. — Neil Strauss

He that has learned to feel his sins, and to trust Christ as a Saviour, has learned the two hardest and greatest lessons in Christianity. — J.I. Packer

While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and challenge. — Martin Jacques

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past. — Townes Van Zandt

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax. — Roger Caillois

Dreams are deformed reflections of ourselves - less stable and more ungraspable than we are, upon which we in our turn assume the right to reflect upon and to determine. — Roger Caillois

If one ox could not do the job they did not try to grow a bigger ox, but used two oxen. When we need greater computer power, the answer is not to get a bigger computer, but ... to build systems of computers and operate them in parallel. — Grace Hopper

We must train ourselves in courage and generosity. — Roger Caillois

Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right. — Roger Caillois

In the land of love, like is more than enough. — M.F. Moonzajer

Never engage in gossip, it kills your soul, and wounds another's heart — Steven Aitchison

I wonder, only in passing, whether the indelible ornamentation that man inscribes upon his own epidermis does not respond to a nostalgia for the universal internally generated coloring of corrollas, furs, shells, carapaces and wings. For man it has been necessary to create both works and tools outside of himself. But it may be that he retains an obscure nostalgia to create them on his own body, to make them a part of it rather than projecting them outwards onto an independent surface, where he is free to retouch them as he sees fit, which is precisely what painting and art are. — Roger Caillois