Quotes by Translators - Page 2

In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane.
Yukichi Fukuzawa
Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads nowhere but to questions.
Richard Seaver
Unhappy people often insist on trying to uncover the full magnitude of their unhappiness, or choose to investigate other people's lives as a distraction from their own.
Javier Marías
I am speaking from experience when I say that forgiveness offered - especially when so undeserved - cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break.
Charles Martin
Danger, the spur of all great minds.
George Chapman
Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
Jyrki Vainonen
As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.
Marie Luise Knott
To need to dominate others is to need others. The commander is dependent.
Fernando Pessoa
I've never understood why the majority of human curses and insults refer to the erotic sphere. Sex is wonderful and associated with beauty, joy and pleasure. How can the names of the sexual organs be used as a vulgar synonym for ̶
Andrzej Sapkowski
Some have said I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.
Ken Liu
Yes it’s me, I myself, what I turned out to be, (…) I’m the one here in myself, it’s me. (…) Whatever I was, whatever I wasn’t—it’s all in what I am. Whatever I wanted, whatever I didn’t want—all of this has shaped me. Whatever I loved, or stopped loving—in me it’s the same nostalgia (Álvaro de Campos)
Fernando Pessoa
In the history of mankind, no single person yet has learned to swim by having the strokes explained. At some point, they dive in.
Charles Martin
I looked at whale jawbones in the museum this morning. Then I did some shopping. Whenever I go into the drugstore it seems that many people are buying condoms and motion sickness medicine.
Lydia Davis
What'll Geoffrey do when you pull off your First, my child?" demanded Miss Ha
Dorothy L. Sayers
From out of your heart, you speak."-Emma, When Crickets Cry
Charles Martin
Writing poetry is talking to oneself; yet it is a mode of talking to oneself in which the self disappears; and the product's something that, though it may not be for everybody, is about everybody.
Richard Wilbur
I and motherland are one. My name is Million, because for millions do I love and suffer agonies.
Adam Mickiewicz
Valuable and ingenious he might be, thought Jack, fixing him with his glass, but false he was too, and perjured. He had voluntarily sworn to have no truck with vampires, and here, attached to his bosom, spread over it and enfolded by one arm, was a greenish hairy thing, like a mat - a loathsome great vampire of the most poisonous kind, no doubt. ‘I should never have believed it of him: his sacred oath in the morning watch and now he stuffs the ship with vampires; and God knows what is in that bag. No doubt he was tempted, but surely he might blush for his fall?’No blush; nothing but a look of idiot delight as he came slowly up the side, hampered by his burden and comforting it in Portuguese as he came.‘I am happy to see that you were so successful, Dr Maturin,’ he said, looking down into the launch and the canoes, loaded with glowing heaps of oranges and shaddocks, red meat, iguanas, bananas, greenstuff. ‘But I am afraid no vampires can be allowed on board.’‘This is a sloth,’ said Stephen, smiling at him. ‘A three-toed sloth, the most affectionate, discriminating sloth you can imagine!’ The sloth turned its round head, fixed its eyes on Jack, uttered a despairing wail, and buried its face again in Stephen’s shoulder, tightening its grip to the strangling-point.
Patrick O'Brian
To the goats, all people are equal, except for those who have treats.
Karin Tidbeck
But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.
Patrick O'Brian
Well...letting the cat out of the bag is a lot easier than putting it in.
Charles Martin
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
Alberto Manguel
This dull, difficult novel I have brought with me on my trip—I keep trying to read it. I have gone back to it so many times, each time dreading it and each time finding it no better than the last time, that by now it has become something of an old friend. My old friend the bad novel.
Lydia Davis
An admirable line of Pablo Neruda’s, “My creatures are born of a long denial,” seems to me the best definition of writing as a kind of exorcism, casting off invading creatures by projecting them into universal existence, keeping them on the other side of the bridge… It may be exaggerating to say that all completely successful short stories, especially fantastic stories, are products of neurosis, nightmares or hallucination neutralized through objectification and translated to a medium outside the neurotic terrain. This polarization can be found in any memorable short story, as if the author, wanting to rid himself of his creature as soon and as absolutely as possible, exorcises it the only way he can: by writing it.
Julio Cortázar
She knows she is in Chicago. But she does not yet realize that she is in Illinois.
Lydia Davis
We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.
Frans Kellendonk
He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small).
Julio Cortázar
In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature - or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organism. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of its elusive body, circulating a continuous supply of fresh blood cells, sending out new data and collecting the old, sending out new consumables and collecting the old, sending out new contradictions and collecting the old. To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city's moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.
Haruki Murakamiurakami
Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools.
George Chapman
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
Ciaran Carson
Great mysteries inhabit the threshold of my being.
Fernando Pessoa
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking
Robert Hass
Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.
Anne Carson
There is also a fable told by Phaedrus, about how Simonides was once a victim of shipwreck. As the other passengers scurried about the sinking ship trying to save their possessions, the poet stood idle. When questioned, he declared, mecum mea sunt cuncta: everything that is me is with me.
Anne Carson
I've swallowed fish-eyes wholelike an endoscope.I once ate a trout cooked inside a dolphin. Felt like a shark eating another shark,inside the cold-blooded womb of yet another shark.
Yann Rousselot
We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Every morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday--the balance of power--that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us.
Javier Marías
When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.
Dezső Kosztolányi
She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The soul is the weariest part of the body.
Paul Bowles
I thought I had made this discovery: that there are unexpected, constant repetitions in our behavior. The right combination of circumstances had enabled me to observe them. One seldom has the chance to be a clandestine witness of several talks between the same people. But scenes are repeated in life, just as they are in the theatre.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
A momentary smile appeared on Cogo's face before fading away. No matter how many times he saw it, he was still amazed by how Kuni's sincerity shaded into an instinct for political theater. He was, of course, moved by the loyalty of a man who would rather be in jail than betray him, but he also knew to play it for all it was worth to cement even more loyalty.
Ken Liu
Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.
Patrick O'Brian
Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial....Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.
Fernando Pessoa
I am who I am.A coincidence no less unthinkablethan any other.I could have had differentancestors, after all.I could have flutteredfrom another nestor crawled bescaledfrom under another tree.Nature's wardrobeholds a fair supply of costumes:spider, seagull, field mouse.Each fits perfectly right offand is dutifully worninto shreds.
Wisława Szymborska
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
You mistake the stars reflected in the surface of the lake at night for the heavens
Andrzej Sapkowski
If the ability to make use of experience and draw conclusions decided, we would have forgotten what war is a long time ago. But those whose goal is war have never been held back, nor will be, by experience or analogy.
Andrzej Sapkowski
She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?
Anne Carson
Give me your tired your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless tempest tossed to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Emma Lazarus
Stenham had always taken it for granted that the dichotomy of belief and behavior was the cornerstone of the Moslem world. It was too deep to be called hypocrisy; it was merely custom. They said one thing and they did something else. They affirmed their adherence to Islam in formulated phrases, but they behaved as though they believed, and actually did believe, something quite different. Still, the unchanging profession of faith was there, and to him it was this eternal contradiction which made them Moslems. But Amar’s relationship to his religion was far more robust: he believed it possible to practice literally what the Koran enjoined him to profess. He kept the precepts constantly in his hand, and applied them on every occasion, at every moment. The fact that such a person as Amar could be produced by this society rather upset Stenham’s calculations. For Stenham, the exception invalidated the rule instead of proving it: if there were one Amar, there could be others. Then the Moroccans were not the known quantity he had thought they were, inexorably conditioned by the pressure of their own rigid society; his entire construction was false in consequence, because it was too simple and did not make allowances for individual variations.
Paul Bowles
We have a soul at times.No one’s got it non-stop,for keeps.Day after day,year after yearmay pass without it.Sometimesit will settle for awhileonly in childhood’s fears and raptures.Sometimes only in astonishmentthat we are old.It rarely lends a handin uphill tasks,like moving furniture,or lifting luggage,or going miles in shoes that pinch.It usually steps outwhenever meat needs choppingor forms have to be filled.For every thousand conversationsit participates in one,if even that,since it prefers silence.Just when our body goes from ache to pain,it slips off-duty.It’s picky:it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,our hustling for a dubious advantageand creaky machinations make it sick.Joy and sorrowaren’t two different feelings for it.It attends usonly when the two are joined.We can count on itwhen we’re sure of nothingand curious about everything.Among the material objectsit favors clocks with pendulumsand mirrors, which keep on workingeven when no one is looking.It won’t say where it comes fromor when it’s taking off again,though it’s clearly expecting such questions.We need itbut apparentlyit needs usfor some reason too.
Wisława Szymborska
Fearlessness is better than a faint heart for any man who puts his nose out of doors. The length of my life and the day of my death were fated long ago.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
Never allow others to create your world because if you do, they will always make it too small.
Christopher Robinson
The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.
Patrick O'Brian
[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.
Dorothy L. Sayers
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
His eyes, green with yellow sparks, and with elongated pupils like a cat’s, made his grandmother gasp and say: ‘Jesus! He has the devil’s eyes!
Olga Núñez Miret
What we ask is to be human individuals, however peculiar and unexpected. It is no good saying: "You are a little girl and therefore you ought to like dolls"; if the answer is, "But I don't," there is no more to be said.
Dorothy L. Sayers
That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attemptedalthough married six months.Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not surewe got it right.He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.Early next dayI wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had publishedin a small quarterly magazine.Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.Or should I say ideal.Neither of us had ever seen Venice.
Anne Carson