Calasso Roberto Quotes & Sayings

Gordian knot, a knot impossible to unravel, and Alexander the Great solved the problem by cutting through it with his sword, in other words by cheating. — Patricia Cornwell

19The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches. It is said that the book was written in one day after Achmed drank too much of the strange thick Klatchian coffee which doesn't just sober you up, but takes you through sobriety and out the other side, so that you glimpse the real universe beyond the clouds of warm self-delusion that sapient life usually generates around itself to stop it turning into a nutcake. Little — Terry Pratchett

As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity. — Roberto Calasso

Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today. — Charles Simic

Miss Tarabotti was not one of life's milk-water misses
in fact, quite the opposite. Many a gentleman had likened his first meeting with her to downing a very strong cognac when one was expecting to imbibe fruit juice
that is to say, startling and apt to leave one with a distinct burning sensation. — Gail Carriger

Education is paradoxical in that it is largely composed of things that cannot be learned — Roberto Calasso

The author is the successor of the saint, everyone respects the author. — Roberto Calasso

Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes. — Roberto Calasso

Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward. — Roberto Calasso

And that's why I finally ended it. I realized today that it's exhausting to be a coward. — Julie Buxbaum

We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself. — Roberto Calasso

The gods are fugitive guests of literature. — Roberto Calasso

There's stories and then there's stories. The ones with any worth change your life forever, perhaps only in a small way, but once you've heard them, they are forever a part of you. You nurture them and pass them on, and the giving only makes you feel better. The others are just words on a page. — Charles De Lint

As soon as the first piece of foliage came within blade's reach, my student started frantically swinging the machete like he was defending his virtue from a trove of drunken, handsy woodland elves. 'I feel like I'm in the movie Predator,' he said as he decapitated a flower. — Michael Gurnow

Theoretically, I grant you, there is no possibility of error in necessary reasoning. But to speak thus "theoretically," is to uselanguage in a Pickwickian sense. In practice, and in fact, mathematics is not exempt from that liability to error that affects everything that man does. — Charles Sanders Peirce

Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches. — Roberto Calasso

ardor which is tapas; the name Indra — Roberto Calasso

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching. — George Bernard Shaw

The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give. — Roberto Calasso

They had to stir the churn of the ocean, until the soma floated up, as butter floats from milk. And this task could not be undertaken in opposition to the Asuras, but only with their help. The pronouncement ran contrary to everything the Devas had previously thought. But in the end, what did they have to lose, given that their lives were so futile? Now they thought: Anything, so long as there be a trial, a risk, a task. — Roberto Calasso

Maybe I'm inclined to what Nietzsche called "impure thought," that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can't disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called "philosophy," should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were. — Roberto Calasso

Wendy Doniger has spent decades collecting not only myths from ancient texts but stories of all kinds from novels, movies, newspapers about an old mystery: what has or hasn't happened in bed for centuries. Rich in insights about sex, lies, and personal identity, the result is entertaining, enthralling, and, yes, sexy. — Roberto Calasso

Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive. — Roberto Calasso