Quotes by Translators - Page 8

[N]othing about a book is so unmistakable and so irreplaceable as the stamp of the cultured mind. I don't care what the story is about or what may be the momentary craze for books that appear to have been hammered out by the village blacksmith in a state of intoxication; the minute you get the easy touch of the real craftsman with centuries of civilisation behind him, you get literature.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Those who loved with all their heart and mind and might have always thought of death, and those who knew the endless nights of harrowing concern for others have longed for it. The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die." (The Faith of a Heretic)
Walter Kaufmann
By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,From there the wind comes and blows over the world,By the sandy water I breathe in the odor of the sea,From there the clouds come and rain falls over the world.
Jane Bierhorst
We keep asking where they have gonethose years we remember and wereach for them like hands in the night
W.S. Merwin
I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.
Patrick O'Brian
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent; A thing brought forth that we didn't know we had in us, So we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out And stood in the light, licking its tail.
Czesław Miłosz
Poetry: three mismatched shoes at the entrance of a dark alley.
Charles Simic
At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.
Indra Sinha
Sometimes the grief was nearby, waiting, just barely held back, and I could ignore it for a while. But at other times it was like a cup that was always full and kept spilling over.
Lydia Davis
I set free the phantoms of my imagination.
Frigyes Karinthy
Ymir was a frost giant; he was evil from the first. While he slept, he began to sweat. A man and woman grew out of the ooze under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on the other leg.
Kevin Crossley-Holland
People respond to gentle words than scolding
Mary Kawena Pukui
I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command.
Dorothy L. Sayers
we roar along the rust belts——the great red spot——the polar vortex——the caress of solar flares——ruffle the molten methane and ammonia oceans of me——the storm-riven non-surface of me and mine——that which you call skin——a threadbare term to describe where I stop and others begin——
Yann Rousselot
I don't even suffer. My disdain for everything is so complete that I even disdain myself. The contempt I have for the sufferings of others I also have for my own. And so all my suffering is crushed under the foot of my disdain.
Fernando Pessoa
Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.
Walter Kaufmann
To hope is to enjoy.
Jacques Delille
We, all who live, haveA life that is livedAnd another life that is thought,And the only life we haveIt's the one that is dividedIn right or wrong.
Fernando Pessoa
A thought for this Damocletian Age: the trouble with justice is it just isn't it?
Nanamoli Thera
Everything that happens to us, everything that we say or hear, everything that we see with our own eyes or we articulate with our tongue, everything that enters through our ears, everything we are witness to (and for which we are therefore partially responsible) must find a recipient outside ourselves and we choose that recipient according to what happens, or what we are told or even according to what we ourselves say. Each thing must be told to someone—though not necessarily to the same person—and each thing will undergo a selection process, the way someone out shopping might scrutinize, set aside, and assess presents for the season to come. Everything must be told at least once, although...it must be told when the time is right, or, which comes to the same thing, at the right moment, and sometimes, if you fail to recognize that right moment or deliberately let it pass, there will never again be another.
Javier Marías
La rutina no está tanto en las cosas como en nuestra incapacidad para crear a cada momento un vínculo original con ellas, en nuestra tendencia a leerlas por la falsilla de lo rutinario, de lo ya aprendido. Hay que seguir dejando siempre abierta la puerta al cuarto de jugar.
Carmen Martín Gaite
Success is no proof of virtue. In the case of a book, quick acclaim is presumptive evidence of a lack of substance and originality.
Walter Kaufmann
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while.
Fernando Pessoa
The departure of the church-going element had induced a more humanitarian atmosphere.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman's breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.
Charles Martin
What do you think of Cain’s affirmations?”“He never told a lie. If he says that God talks to him, he is convinced that God is talking to him.”“Do you believe he is a saint?”“God only knows, and never better said. He might be, but again, I have my own taste on the matter. I’m not keen on perfection, especially when it’s dressed up like hardness. I prefer the cracked plate, the slightly blunt spear…”“The imperfect human being.”“Yes. The gloriously imperfect human being.
Olga Núñez Miret
They do sometimes protest...At these times, she sounds authoritative. But she has no authority.
Lydia Davis
The human being is not a fallen being in need of redemption but rather a forgetful being who must be reminded of God and his own nature.
Joseph E. B. Lumbard
A continued atmosphere of hectic passion is very trying if you haven't got any of your own.
Dorothy L. Sayers
As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.
Nataly Kelly
Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.
Fernando Pessoa
If man be sensible and one fine morning, while he is lying in bed,counts at the tips of his fingers how many things in this life truly willgive him enjoyment, invariably he will find food is the first one.
Lin Yutang
They say you can fool some of the people all of the time. Accordingly, I think we should concentrate on this group initially. We can move on to the people you can only fool some of the time at a later date if we deem it necessary.
Stephen Mitchell
It was a practical trip, straight across the country. No pit stops at canned meat museums, no national parks. Just a whole lot of Wynebraskowa.
Kari Martindale
If Elirena was a hero, if what she did is heroism, then that's just too bad. Let them call me a traitor and a coward. Because I, Yarpen Zigrin, coward, traitor and renegade, state that we should not kill each other. I state that we ought to live. Live in such a way that we don't, later, have to ask anyone for forgiveness. The Heroic Elirena... She had to ask. Forgive me, she begged, forgive me. To hell with that! It's better to die than to live in the knowledge that you've done something that needs forgiveness.
Andrzej Sapkowski
The really essential factors of success in any undertaking are money and opportunity, and as a rule, the man who can make the first can make the second.
Dorothy L. Sayers
One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. Experiences and aspirations of which intimations may be found in Plato, Nietzsche, and Spinoza have found their most evocative expression in some sacred books. Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.
Walter Kaufmann
How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.
Paul Bowles
Soaked in painmy suits remain standingwhen I take them off - hollow men beside the closet,a museum of days.
Chad Sweeney
The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves. I have always known that the big surprises await us where we have learned to be surprised by nothing, that is, where we are not shocked by ruptures in the order.
Julio Cortázar
[T]he more clamour we make about 'the women's point of view', the more we rub it into people that the women's point of view is different, and frankly I do not think it is -- at least in my job. The line I always want to take is, that there is the 'point of view' of the reasonably enlightened human brain, and that this is the aspect of the matter which I am best fitted to uphold.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I'd like to be born the son of a duke with 90,000 pounds a year, on an enormous estate.... And I'd like to have the most enormous library, and I'd like to think that I could read those books forever and forever, and die unlamented, unknown, unsung, unhonored - and packed with information.
Richard Francis Burton
The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.
John Crowley
We are much too much inclined in these days to divide people into permanent categories, forgetting that a category only exists for its special purpose and must be forgotten as soon as that purpose is served.
Dorothy L. Sayers
You're well enough looked after now' says Farouq. 'We are your friends. Don't we care about you? All this bitterness, it's in your own mind. To be accepted as a human being, you must behave like one. The more human you act, the more human you'll be.' He spoils the effect of this decent speech by adding with a smirk, 'Four-foot cunt.
Indra Sinha
...It is far more sinful to pray irregularly than not to pray at all.
Paul Bowles
The change of language is a change in reality.
Stephen Mitchell
A knowledge with no clear idea of Evil as universe and principle, a knowledge that pays no mind to the evil that man is and was and for which he is forced to atone, is knowledge with a view to Evil, in favor of Evil, and probably suggested by Evil.
Ceronetti
Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
Czesław Miłosz
...when one is alone it is impossible to be dead.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Everything that happens where we live happens in us. Everything that ceases in what we see ceases in us. Everything that has been, if we saw it when it was, was taken from us when it went away.
Fernando Pessoa
People who make some other person part of their job are dangerous.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I imagine you come across a number of people who are disconcerted by the difference between what you do feel and what they fancy you ought to feel. It is fatal to pay the smallest attention to them.”“Yes,” said Harriet, “but I am one of them. I disconcert myself very much. I never know what I do feel.”“I don’t think that matters, provided one doesn’t try to persuade one’s self into appropriate feelings.
Dorothy L. Sayers
What we make is more important than what we are particularly if making is our profession.
Dorothy L. Sayers
An artist must paint not simply surface light, but what is inside, what he sees within his subject
Frank Wynne
It is better to go forward without a goal, than to have a goal and stay in one place, and it is certainly better than to stay in one place without a goal.
Andrzej Sapkowski
All these are readers, and their gestures, their craft, the pleasure, the responsibility and the power they derive from reading, are common with mine. I am not alone.
Alberto Manguel
Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.
Osip Mandelstam
How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck
Patrick O'Brian