“The possibility of the impossible, dreams and illusions, are the subject of my novels.”
Introduction
The Stone Raft (1994)
“The novels that attract me most… are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”
Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Last update June 3, 2021.
History
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Italo Calvino 44
Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels 1923–1985Related quotes
Robert Wilson Lynd
(1879–1949) Irish writer
Searchlights and Nightingales https://books.google.com/books?id=z7pCAQAAIAAJ&dq=%22The+belief+in+the+possibility+of+a+short+decisive+war+appears+to+be+one+of+the+most+ancient+and+dangerous+of+human+illusions.%22&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22human+illusions%22 [Google Books snippet view only] (1939), p. 67.
Robertson Davies
(1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist
I Remember Creatore (1948).
Context: My curiosity was in no way cruel. Deviations from the commonplace attracted me strongly, as they still do; and to me the hermaphrodite and the living skeleton were interesting for the same reason as was Creatore, or the resplendent Guardsmen of the bands — because such people did not often come my way, and I hoped that they might impart some great revelation to me, some insight which would help me to a clearer understanding of the world about me.
Herb Goldberg
(1937–2019) American psychologist
What Men Still Don't Know About Transforming Their Relationships, pp. 194–198
What Men Still Don't Know About Women, Relationships, and Love (2007)
Intro
The Shipping News (1993)
Albert Einstein
(1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
"Education for Independent Thought" in The New York Times, 5 October 1952. Reprinted in Ideas and Opinions (1954)
1950s
Context: It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind of useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and a lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge—more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow-men and to the community. These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not—or at least not in the main—through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.
