Quotes by Translators - Page 14

Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
Fernando Pessoa
I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings.
Tomas Tranströmer
Without asking anybody’s advice I turned myself insane sitting under the same sun and the same clouds.
Suman Pokhrel
We live in the hope that life will be different. Just a little more substance perhaps in the intrinsic frailty of the days. Such resignation frightens me. Between gunshots I get drunk. In secret, all knowledge becomes anxiety.
Floriano Martins
To pretend is to know oneself.
Fernando Pessoa
Flatterers look like friends as wolves like dogs.
George Chapman
If they finally move, is it because they are warm enough, or is it that they are stiff, or bored?
Lydia Davis
Let me burn out for God ... prayer is the great thing. Oh that I may be a man of prayer!
Henry Martyn
I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing, dancingin astonished skin, inan embrace that creates me.
Wisława Szymborska
There are braying men in the world as well as braying asses; for what's loud and senseless talking and swearing, any other than braying?
Sir Roger L'Estrange
Heart weeps.Head tries to help heart.Head tells heart how it is, again:You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.Heart feels better, then.But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.Heart is so new to this.I want them back, says heart.Head is all heart has.Help, head. Help heart.
Lydia Davis
I love America," he'd tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.
Charles Simic
One gains courage from the one in front of her and moves forward a few steps, passing her by just a little. Now the one farthest back gains courage from the one in front and moves forward until she, in turn, is the leader. And so in this way, taking courage from one another, they advance, as a group, towards the strange thing in front of them.
Lydia Davis
at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…
Anne Carson
Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.
Paul Bowles
Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!
Dorothy L. Sayers
Fatuous words I don't trust you I trust silenceMore than beauty more than anythingA festival of understanding
František Halas
Life’s mystery continued to trouble meA question came to my mind, is freedom dearer than life? or does it become easier to live when life becomes difficult?
Suman Pokhrel
The man who most vividly realizes a difficulty is the man most likely to overcome it.
Joseph Farrell
Fiction should always steer clear of political considerations.
Paul Bowles
History is written by the victors. Legends are woven by the people. Writers fantasize. Only death is certain."To Die for One's Country is Glorious," p. 131
Danilo Kiš
When it comes, you’ll be dreamingthat you don’t need to breathe;that breathless silence isthe music of the darkand it’s part of the rhythmto vanish like a spark.
Wisława Szymborska
Only God would adore his own death.
Floriano Martins
The sun shines, snow falls, mountains rise and valleys sink, night deepens and pales into day, but it is only very seldom that we attend to such things. . . . When we are grasping the inexpressible meaning of these things, this is life, this is living. To do this twenty-four hours a day is the Way of Haiku. It is having life more abundantly.
R.H. Blyth
What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matter are the possibilities and ideas that the novelist’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention.
Javier Marías
What is more important for the world right now than preserving ways of living in balance with the earth?
Daoud Hari
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Dorothy L. Sayers
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
Robert Hass
Not all deceptions are palatable. Untruths are too easy to come by, too quickly exploded, too cheap and ephemeral to give lasting comfort. Mundus vult decipi, but there is a hierarchy of deceptions.Near the bottom of the ladder is journalism: a steady stream of irresponsible distortions that most people find refreshing although on the morning after, or at least within a week, it will be stale and flat.On a higher level we find fictions that men eagerly believe, regardless of the evidence, because they gratify some wish.Near the top of the ladder we encounter curious mixtures of untruth and truth that exert a lasting fascination on the intellectual community.
Walter Kaufmann
Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.
Alberto Manguel
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and this be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost.
Javier Marías
They were both sad that their love had died, but they agreed that there was nothing they could do about it. They would just have to part.
Siobhán Parkinson
Through an experience that simultaneously involved my sensibility and intelligence, I realized early on that the imaginative life, however morbid it might seem, is the one that suits temperaments like mine. The fictions of my imagination (as it later developed) may weary me, but they don't hurt or humiliate. Impossible lovers can't cheat on us, or smile at us falsely, or be calculating in their caresses. They never forsake us, and they don't die or disappear. --The book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
I had reached a juncture in my reading life that is familiar to those who have been there: in the allotted time left to me on earth, should I read more and more new books, or should I cease with that vain consumption--vain because it is endless--and begin to reread those books that had given me the intensest pleasure in my past.
Lydia Davis
...most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layeredwill make a window out of fire. It's cold and the faces at the windowdo what faces usually do they open onto a genetic historythat looks up suddenly and it's the eyes everyone says you can't say that's not alive
Cole Swensen
Thanks to Lana Turner, Eleven Eleven, The Nation, LIT Magazine (USA), Critical Quarterly (UK), Beautiful Outlaw Press, no press, The Capilano Review, cv2, Rhubarb and Centre A Gallery (Canada).
Erín Moure
I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted - and nothing in which I’ve placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that moment - that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that Fate has always tried to make me love or want things just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I didn’t have and could never have them.
Fernando Pessoa
Prawda jest córą czasu poczętą w przypadkowym i krótkotrwałym romansie ze zbiegiem okoliczności.
Andrzej Sapkowski
It was becoming evident to many that while evil grows all by itself, good can be achieved only through hard struggle and maintained only through tireless effort, ..
Heda Margolius Kovály
Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.
Paul Bowles
The way you walk is slash and burn.Like understatement's now a crime.
Justin Quinn
If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.
Thomas de Quincey
In this atmosphere Where you have to go perennially crazy only to survive, Which auspicious moment should I choose to become mad?
Suman Pokhrel
Music touches places beyond our touching.
Keith Bosley
The more a victory cost, the more it was esteemed.
Patrick O'Brian
My love for Neo-Tokyo is a bulbous massof post-human organic circuitry.Cyperpunk is my mother tongue.My love is a man-machine interface gun.
Yann Rousselot
The greatest tribute one can give to a writer is that it is simply enough to read him.
Isaac Goldberg
He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.
Edith Pargeter
I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.
Fernando Pessoa
In how many minds should I go crazy? Whom should I ask?
Suman Pokhrel
Like many others, I grew up in an age that preached liberty and built slave camps.
Charles Simic
There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.
Paul Bowles
The basic Irrational Act which is renewed every moment of life, is not to commit suicide.
Nanamoli Thera
It's an invention, a fairy tale devoid of any sense, like all the legends in which good spirits and fortune tellers fulfill wishes. Stories like that are made up by poor simpletons, who can't even dream of fulfilling their wishes and desires themselves. I'm pleased you're not one of them, Geralt of Rivia. It makes you closer in spirit to me. If I want something, I don't dream of it—I act. And I always get what I want.
Andrzej Sapkowski
The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
Fernando Pessoa
Renouncing false beliefs will not usher in the millennium. Few things about the strategy of contemporary apologists are more repellent than their frequent recourse to spurious alternatives. The lesser lights inform us that the alternative to Christianity is materialism, thus showing how little they have read, while the greater lights talk as if the alternative were bound to be a shallow and inane optimism. I don't believe that man will turn this earth into a bed of roses either with the aid of God or without it. Nor does life among the roses strike me as a dream from which one would not care to wake up after a very short time.
Walter Kaufmann
There is no way I can avoid thinking about the kind of world I belong to. The abuse of utopias disfigures everything.
Floriano Martins
I was washing outside in the darkness,the sky burning with rough stars,and the starlight, salt on an axe-blade.The cold overflows the barrel.The gate's locked,the land's grim as its conscience.I don't think they'll find the new weaving,finer than truth, anywhere.Star-salt is melting in the barrel,icy water is blackening,death's growing purer, misfortune saltier,the earth's moving nearer to truth and to dread.
Innokenty Annensky
My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
Fernando Pessoa
The five senses offer us five different ways of shutting out reality. What is intuition and what does it perceive?
Nanamoli Thera