Quotes by Translators - Page 5

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.
Alberto Manguel
For when the mind becomes bound to a passion of the wandering senses, this passion carries away man's wisdom, even as the wind drives a vessel on the waves.
Juan Mascaró
Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Well, I will wear the bees, like Damon and Pythagoras – ho, a mere sixty thousand bees in the cabin don't signify, much.
Patrick O'Brian
You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.
Bänoo Zan
Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.
Alberto Manguel
There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn to love a person while continuing to be selfish.
Lydia Davis
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. […]. I'm two, and both keep their distance — Siamese twins that aren't attached.
Fernando Pessoa
Refutations of the views of inherently existent production are not just refutations of rival systems but should be taken as a branch of the process of overcoming one's own innate sense that things are inherently produced. The innate non-analytical intellect does not conceive cause and effect to be either the same, or inherently different, or both, or neither; however, if the objects that the intellect misconceives as inherently existent did in fact inherently exist, they would necessarily exist in one of these four ways. Thus, through eliminating these four possibilities, the inherently existent products that are the objects of this innate ignorance are shown to be non-existent. By attacking in this way the falsely conceived object, the falsely conceiving subject is gradually overcome. The false subject is removed by overcoming belief in the false object.
Jeffrey Hopkins
As has already been noted, fantastic literature developed at precisely the moment when genuine belief in the supernatural was on the wane, and when the sources provided by folklore could safely be used as literary material. It is almost a necessity, for the writer as well as for the reader of fantastic literature, that he or she should not believe in the literal truth of the beings and objects described, although the preferred mode of literary expression is a naive realism. Authors of fantastic literature are, with a few exceptions, not out to convert, but to set down a narrative story endowed with the consistency and conviction of inner reality only during the time of the reading: a game, sometimes a highly serious game, with anxiety and fright, horror and terror.
Franz Rottensteiner
What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone's orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.
Anne Carson
In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.
Nataly Kelly
As if you could pick in love, as if it were not a lightning bolt that splits your bones and leaves you staked out in the middle of the courtyard. (...) You don't pick out the rain that soaks you to the skin when you come out of a concert.
Julio Cortázar
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Fernando Pessoa
They are the efforts of someone who, overarced by stars that are human handiwork, and who, shelterless in this till now undreamt of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being into language, reality-wounded and reality-seeking.
Paul Celan
The planet's tyrant, dotard Death, had held his gray mirror before them for a moment and shown them the image of things to come.
Dorothy L. Sayers
You have control over doing your respective duty, but no control or claim over the result. Fear of failure, from being emotionally attached to the fruit of work, is the greatest impediment to success because it robs efficiency by constantly disturbing the equanimity of mind.
Ramananda Prasad
Religious ceremonial nowadays provides less opportunity for bad language and sexual symbolism.
Aubrey de Sélincourt
Man has reached the moon, but twenty centuries ago a poet knew the enchantments that would make the moon come down to earth.
Julio Cortázar
It is easy to let go of the string and think: This isn't me, it's the arrow. My hands do not bear the blood of this boy, it's the arrow that killed him, not me. But the arrow does not dream at night.
Andrzej Sapkowski
With slight misconceptions of reality we fabricate our hopes and beliefs, and we live off crusts that we call cakes, like poor children who make-believe they’re happy.
Fernando Pessoa
The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated.
R.H. Blyth
People," Geralt turned his head, "like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves. When they get blind-drunk, cheat, steal, beat their wives, starve an old woman, when they kill a trapped fox with an axe or riddle the last existing unicorn with arrows, they like to think that the Bane entering cottages at daybreak is more monstrous than they are. They feel better then. They find it easier to live.
Andrzej Sapkowski
You are to consider that a certain melancholy and often a certain irascibility accompany advancing age: indeed it might be said that advancing age equals ill-temper. On reaching the middle years a man perceives that he is no longer able to do certain things, that what looks he may have had are deserting him, that he has a ponderous great belly, and that however much he may yet burn he is no longer attractive to women; and he rebels. Fortitude, resignation and philosophy are of more value than any pills, red, white or blue.
Patrick O'Brian
My past is everything I failed to be.
Fernando Pessoa
You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix you breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, then no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation.
Anthony M. Esolen
These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.
R.H. Blyth
Most men find [peace] entirely unlike what they had expected - like love...
Patrick O'Brian
The time of the photograph is [always] after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end, in a time without time, un[re]countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, “l’anéantissement anéanti, la fin… privée d’elle-même.
Nathanaël
Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree. The Sixth Ancestor said, "Gentlemen! It is not the wind that moves; it is not the flag that moves; it is your mind that moves.
The Mumonkan Case 29 translation by Robert Aitken
Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
John Ciardi
Fantastic literature has been especially prominent in times of unrest, when the older values have been overthrown to make way for the new; it has often accompanied or predicted change, and served to shake up rational Complacency, challenging reason and reminding man of his darker nature. Its popularity has had its ups and downs, and it has always been the preserve of a small literary minority. As a natural challenger of classical values, it is rarely part of a culture's literary mainstream, expressing the spirit of the age; but it is an important dissenting voice, a reminder of the vast mysteries of existence, sometimes truly metaphysical in scope, but more often merely riddling.
Franz Rottensteiner
an odious crime, as old as the Bible and for an utterly despicable motive too and carried out in a cowardly manner, making use of intermediaries.
Javier Marías
August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.
Robert Hass
Is it that my habit of placing myself in the souls of other people makes me see myself as others see or would see me if they noticed my presence there? It is. And once I've perceived what they would feel about me if they knew me, it is as if they were feeling and expressing it at that very moment. It is a torture to me to live with other people. Then there are those who live inside me. Even when removed from life, I'm forced to live with them. Alone, I am hemmed in by multitudes. I have nowhere to flee to, unless I were to flee myself.
Fernando Pessoa
Men learn wisdom from their sins, not from their righteous deeds.
Marmaduke William Pickthall
He intrigued her. Powerful men, in her experience, were usually not so full of doubt. Kuni was consumed by the desire to do good for others, but uncertain what "good" might be and whether he was the right man for the job.Kuni was the sort of man, Risana realized, who, rather than deceive himself, was so full of self-doubt that he could not longer see himself
Ken Liu
Don’t give me that Christian forgiveness bullshit, Dukach. I’m a vindictive Jew!” he’d bellow.
Jonathan Galassi
Name me no names for my disease,With uninforming breath;I tell you I am none of these,But homesick unto death —Homesick for hills that I had known,For brooks that I had crossed,...Before I met this flesh and boneAnd followed and was lost… .And though they break my heart at last,Yet name no name of ills.Say only, "Here is where he passed,Seeking again those hills.
Witter Bynner
To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers.
X.J. Kennedy
Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather the learned sympathy towards the pain of others.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn't real.
Qiu Xiaolong
Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve?
Edith Pargeter
For whom, I asked myself innocently, were the riches and dominions that the English conquered and held on to at any price in the most remote corners of the planet? The neighborhoods which succeeded one another interminably down the narrow cobbled streets were not inhabited by the beneficiaries of those enterprises.
Sylvia Iparraguirre
In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
Gentility is what is left over from rich ancestors after the money is gone.
John Ciardi
In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.
Asti Hustvedt
We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first one was cut, but to the last one. Human memory is virtual, like that of a computer. When we open a file we’re not opening it as it was when we first created it, but as it was the last time we used it. It is called hypercathexis and is our brain’s most sophisticated recourse when it comes to confronting pain.
Enrique de Hériz
G.K. Chesterton once wrote that the trouble with people who do not believe in God is not that they then believe in nothing. It is that they will believe in anything. And the biggest anything around for people to believe in, in our day, is the State. We might put it this way. We should substitute for the wonder of the imagination the irritable flush of political partisanship. We should accept the maxim that all human endeavor is ultimately about power. Therefore education is about power. So is art.
Anthony M. Esolen
Japan is the first nation in the world to accord 'comic books'--originally a 'humorous' form of entertainment mainly for young people--nearly the same social status as novels and films.
Frederik L. Schodt
To duplicate meanings is to isolate the consciousness.
Floriano Martins
But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.
Stephen Mitchell
I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told.
John Crowley
He doesn't hear but sees the Voice.
Stephen Mitchell
The faces you clutch at desperately slip away; it's when you're not thinking about them that their features flash past. It can happen on a street corner, at the turn of a staircase, because somebody said a word, because some image, an image has passed. Then the face is there for a split second, very fragile. One mustn't grasp at it, or it whisks away. One might as well try and catch a cloud. It was a cloud.
François Maspero
The soldier doesn’t usually act on his own initiative, he doesn’t harbour feelings of hatred or resentment or jealousy, he isn’t motivated by long-held desires or personal ambition; the only motivating force is a vague, rhetorical, empty patriotism, for those soldiers, that is, who are moved by such feelings or allow themselves to be convinced.
Javier Marías
The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light.There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun.
Wisława Szymborska
My choices are rejections, since there is no other way,but what I reject is more numerous,denser, more demanding than before.A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable loss.
Wisława Szymborska
I am writing this on a computer that I can’t imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don’t know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong’s childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.
Jeremy Tiang
Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, full of unknowns, asking questions but raising possibilities.
Florian Armas