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Roger Caillois Quotes

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

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
Memories, Needs, Syntax
Roger Caillois (1985). “The writing of stones”, Univ of Virginia Pr

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
Running, Stress, Reality

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
Art, Independent, Men

We must train ourselves in courage and generosity.

Roger Caillois
Generosity, Train
Roger Caillois, Claudine Frank, Camille Naish (2003). “The edge of surrealism: a Roger Caillois reader”, Duke University Press Books

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

Roger Caillois
Order, Everyday, Fantastic

Clausius and Darwin cannot both be right.

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
Dream, Reflection, Assuming

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
Expectations, Challenges, Secret
Roger Caillois (1985). “The writing of stones”, Univ of Virginia Pr

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