Quotes by Translators - Page 10

Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison.
Patrick O'Brian
It isn't the evil and indecent who are flung down into the depths, no! Oh, no! The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.
Andrzej Sapkowski
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or
Dorothy L. Sayers
Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. 'Theme for a novel: The contrary pull ... " No. If this notion were real, he needn't make a note. A notion on which a note had to be made would be stillborn anyway, his notebook was a parish register of such, born and dead on the same page. Let it live if it can. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
Most people like praise . . . When it is really deserved most people expand under it into richer and better selves.
Joseph Farrell
If every library is in some sense a reflection of its readers, it is also an image of that which we are not, and cannot be.
Alberto Manguel
Listening is the most dangerous thing of all, listening means knowing, finding out about something and knowing what’s going on, our ears don’t have lids that can instinctively close against the words uttered, they can’t hide from what they sense they’re about to hear, it’s always too late.
Javier Marías
One day when I ventured into the garden to regard its bloom,My eyes beheld on a bower a withered rose.When I inquired what had caused the blight,"My lips for a moment opened in a smile in this garden," it replied.
Musharraf Ali Farooqi
How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion.
Anthony M. Esolen
He was being about as protective as a can-opener.
Dorothy L. Sayers
...I am talking about evil.It blooms.It eats.It grins.
Anne Carson
We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.
Anthony M. Esolen
Let us be honest we have praised Angulimala, will make no difference If you convey my salute to Amrapali.
Suman Pokhrel
I'll be living quietly in a house somewhere in the suburbs, enjoying a peaceful existence not writing the book I'm not writing now and, so as to continue not doing so, I will come up with different excuses from the ones I use now to avoid actually confronting myself. Or else I'll be interned in a poorhouse, content with my utter failure, mingling with the riffraff who believed they were geniuses when in fact they were just beggars with dreams, mixing with the anonymous mass of people who had neither the strength to triumph nor the power to turn their defeats into victories.
Fernando Pessoa
In their effort to divorce language and experience, deconstructionist critics remind me of middle-class parents who do not allow their children to play in the street.
Charles Simic
Do you see how much power you have when you act without fear?
Ken Liu
Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.
Claire Holden Rothman
The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.
George Dardess
To sit indoors was silly. I postponed the search for Savchenko and Ludmila till the next day and went wandering about Paris. The men wore bowlers, the women huge hats with feathers. On the café terraces lovers kissed unconcernedly - I stopped looking away. Students walked along the boulevard St. Michel. They walked in the middle of the street, holding up traffic, but no one dispersed them. At first I thought it was a demonstration - but no, they were simply enjoying themselves. Roasted chestnuts were being sold. Rain began to fall. The grass in the Luxembourg gardens was a tender green. In December! I was very hot in my lined coat. (I had left my boots and fur cap at the hotel.) There were bright posters everywhere. All the time I felt as though I were at the theatre.
Ilya Ehrenburg
But, deep in her heart she knew more than what the words read or heard seemed to say. She knew that every letter in every word in every war bulletin was, somewhere, first written in blood of men, of human beings, who had once smiled and sung songs, eaten, drunk, slept and loved.
Kate Seredy
Time and trouble will tame an advanced young woman. But an advanced old woman is uncontrollable by any force.
Dorothy L. Sayers
A little self-doubt is a good thing," said Jia, "but not excessive doubt. Sometimes we live up to the stories others tell about us.
Ken Liu
I salute my desires with a bow.were it not for them to come and playmind would be empty just like me.
Suman Pokhrel
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.
Czesław Miłosz
Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn't a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.
John Crowley
Look, there's no metaphysics on earth like chocolates.
Fernando Pessoa
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
Thomas de Quincey
At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.
Fernando Pessoa
See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is the bond uniting all the Oxford people in the last resort.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I do not believe that a dream should necessarily be taken for reality, or reality for madness.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.
Danilo Kiš
Anonymous > Quotes > Quotable Quote“I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don’t know where it will take me, because I don’t know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I’m compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it’s here that I meet others. But I’m neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I’m sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing – for myself alone – wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Fernando Pessoa
Explanation is a well-dressed error.
Julio Cortázar
It is in the company of others that one can be really lonely, for then one's personality is forced openly to try to express what it's separate individuality is.
Nanamoli Thera
I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.
Osip Mandelstam
Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others.
Fernando Pessoa
The bright side of the planet moves toward darknessAnd the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,And for me, now as then, it is too much.There is too much world.
Czesław Miłosz
It is no ipso facto escape from dogma to assert (knowingly or not) non-dogmatism dogmatically.It is no ipso facto escape from credulity to believe in one's own scepticism.
Nanamoli Thera
Within himself Jack had not the slightest doubt of victory, but it would never do to let this conviction take the form of even unspoken words; it must remain in the state of that inward glow which had inhabited him ever since the retaking of the Africaine, and which had now increased to fill the whole of his heart - a glow that he believed to be his most private secret, although in fact it was evident to everyone aboard from Stephen Maturin to the adenoidal third-class boy who closed the muster-book.
Patrick O'Brian
Here we stand between two eternities of darkness. What are we to do with this glory while it is still ours?
Gilbert Murray
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Fernando Pessoa
-A Word On Statistics-Out of every hundred people, those who always know better:fifty-two.Unsure of every step:almost all the rest. Ready to help,if it doesn't take long:forty-nine. Always good,because they cannot be otherwise:fourwell, maybe five. Able to admire without envy:eighteen. Led to errorby youth (which passes):sixty, plus or minus. Those not to be messed with:four-and-forty. Living in constant fearof someone or something:seventy-seven. Capable of happiness:twenty-some-odd at most. Harmless alone,turning savage in crowds:more than half, for sure. Cruelwhen forced by circumstances:it's better not to know,not even approximately. Wise in hindsight:not many morethan wise in foresight. Getting nothing out of life except things:thirty(though I would like to be wrong). Balled up in painand without a flashlight in the dark:eighty-three, sooner or later. Those who are just:quite a few, thirty-five. But if it takes effort to understand:three. Worthy of empathy:ninety-nine. Mortal:one hundred out of one hundreda figure that has never varied yet.
Wisława Szymborska
So muchhuman cruelty is simplyincidental is simplybrainless. Simply nocommon sense. You couldtake the entirety of thecommon sense of humansand put it in the palm ofyour hand and still haveroom for your dick.
Anne Carson
Fair and unfair are for children
Michelle Lovric
Quote from "The Whole World Is Gone" ".... It's sensual, though, too, and interestingly mental. What I do alone, loving him in my mind. Trying not to let imagination win over reality. Hurtling through the night passions so spent become facts one observes. Not tempered, just momentarily out of view by the body that perceives them. Turning that into my prayer: to be deprived.
Jennifer Grotz
People always think it's unprofessional if your appearance doesn't match your biological sex. What does my gender have to do with my skills?
Marcel Weyers
Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.
Pascal Quignard
Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me.Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.
Anne Carson
Plato utterly condemns the poets for publishing trivial, false and indeed wicked stories about the gods, such as that they fight with each other, or are overcome by emotions like grief, anger, mirth. Reluctantly, he will not allow Homer in his Republic, and he is very angry with the tragic poets for spreading unworthy ideas of the Deity.It may well be that there were inferior tragic poets who deserved Plato's strictures, but so far as concerns the tragic poets whom we know, Plato's attack is absurd. It is the attack of a severely intellectual philosopher who was also more of a poet than most poets have contrived to be; one who invented some of the profoundest and most beautiful of Greek myths. 'There is a long-standing quarrel', says Plato, 'between philosophy and poetry.' So there was, on the part of the philosophers, and most of all in Plato's own soul.
H.D.F. Kitto
The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.
Marsilio Ficino
With wine and being lost, withless and less of both:I rode through the snow, do you read meI rode God far--I rode Godnear, he sang,it wasour last ride overthe hurdled humans.They cowered whenthey heard usoverhead, theywrote, theylied our neighinginto one of theirimage-ridden languages.
Paul Celan
If we loved children, we would have a few. If we had them, we would want them as children, and would love the wonder with which they behold the world, and would hope some of it might open our eyes a little. We would love their games, and would want to play them once in a while, stirring in ourselves those memories of play that no one regrets, and that are almost the only things an old man can look back on with complete satisfaction. We would want children tagging along after us, or if not, then only because we would understand that they had better things to do.
Anthony M. Esolen
There's a non-existent peace in the uncertain quietness
Fernando Pessoa
Don't be so damned discouraging," said Wimsey. "I have already carefully explained to you that this time I am investigating this business. Anybody would think you had no confidence in me.""People have been wrongly condemned before now.""Exactly; simply because I wasn't there.""I never thought of that.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
Richard Francis Burton
Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.
John Crowley
A little after moonrise Stephen woke. Extreme hunger had brought on cramps in his midriff again and he held his breath to let them pass: Jack was still sitting there, the tiller under his knee, the sheet in his hand, as though he had never moved, as though he were as immoveable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as unaffected by hunger, thirst, fatigue, or despondency. In this light he even looked rock-like, the moon picking out the salient of his nose and jaw and turning his broad shoulders and upper man into one massive block. He had in fact lost almost as much weight as a man can lose and live, and in the day his shrunken, bearded face with deep-sunk eyes was barely recognizable; but the moon showed the man unchanged.
Patrick O'Brian
You have to fall in love with hanging around words.
John Ciardi
Wandering across a city — walking often quite alone, down dark alleys, through unfrequented districts and debouching suddenly onto main thoroughfares where for a spell one follows the main stream, is adopted by a group "he has come where we come from, wants to go where we want to go". For a while it is true but the side streets are there. Pause in one of them for a moment, and the stream has moved on. So, as there is no catching up with the group, there is no more reason to return to the main street than to wander away from it... more alleys... more thoroughfares... Where shall we be sleeping tonight? And those odd encounters of eyes in lonely alleys...
Nanamoli Thera