The gods are fugitive guests of literature.
Roberto CalassoRead
Myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Myth encompasses multiple narratives and interpretations, much like a tree with various branches.
This quote highlights the complexity and richness of myth, suggesting that it cannot be reduced to a singular narrative. Instead, myths are like trees with numerous branches, representing the different stories, perspectives, and meanings that people derive from them, reflecting the diversity of human experience and understanding.
Themes
MythStoriesNarrativeBranchesInterpretation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about cultural myths, this quote can illustrate how different societies interpret their legends.
More from Roberto Calasso
All quotes βWe 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 CalassoRead
Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.
Roberto CalassoRead
Stories never live alone; They are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward.
Roberto CalassoRead
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 CalassoRead
Similar quotes
Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.
Nam June PaikRead
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.
Simone De BeauvoirRead
If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will -the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.
William HazlittRead
I ask why your Omnipotent God does not hold a man back when he is about to commit a sin or offence. It is childβs play for God. Why did He not kill war lords? Why did He not remove the fury of war from their minds? In this way God could have saved humanity from great calamity and horror.
Bhagat SinghRead
Dwell in peace in the home of your own being, and the Messenger of Death will not be able to touch you.
Guru NanakRead
It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.
Don DelilloRead