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Roberto Calasso Quotes

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

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

Roberto Calasso
Tree, Stories, Branches

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

Roberto Calasso
Might, Alive, Divine
Roberto Calasso (2010). “Literature and the Gods”, p.34, Vintage

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

Roberto Calasso
Stories, Branches
Roberto Calasso (1993). “The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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
Sacrifice, Giving, Connections
"Roberto Calasso speaks on 'The Last Superstition'". The Paris Review interview, bookhaven.stanford.edu.

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
Father, Hero, Men

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

Roberto Calasso
Inspirational, Paradoxical
Roberto Calasso, William Weaver, Stephen Sartarelli (1994). “The Ruin of Kasch”, p.48, Harvard University Press

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Roberto Calasso
Literature, Guests, Fugitive

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
Sexy, Lying, Identity

The author is the successor of the saint, everyone respects the author.

Roberto Calasso
Saint, Successors

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