Quotes by Translators - Page 9

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.
Alberto Manguel
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
Alberto Manguel
I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.
Fernando Pessoa
He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one day be understood, strangers will accept our words, our lives, as if they were their own.
Dezső Kosztolányi
From New Year's Eve through the third of January, the streets of Tokyo grew quiet, as if all the people had disappeared.
Shogo Oketani
There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.
John Crowley
First they burned her - that was last month. Actually just two weeks ago. Now they're starvng him. When he's dead, they'll burn him too.Oh, how jolly. All this burning of family members in the summertime.
Lydia Davis
If the world is divided between Fascism and Communism, obviously Fascism must lose since it is the last, desperate refuge of the bourgeoisie
Czesław Miłosz
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Alberto Manguel
Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.
Anne Carson
Compulsion is the death of friendship, joy.
Patrick O'Brian
The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I think I am a rare breed, a homosexual who doesn't like men.
Michel Tremblay
To be free is not to live in no place and at no time but to live in one place as in the shadow of all places, and to live in one time as in the morning twilight of eternity.
Anthony Esolen
When we're down and the momentum is stacked against us. Those are the moments when we find out what we're made of. When we learn to trust and lean on each other.
Charles Martin
Wordplay hides a key to reality that the dictionary tries in vain to lock inside every free word.
Julio Cortázar
In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else's dream.
Fernando Pessoa
For me the thing that signals a great story is what we might call its autonomy, the fact that it detaches itself from its author like a soap bubble blown from a clay pipe.
Julio Cortázar
If you think of something, do it.Plenty of people often think, “I’d like to do this, or that.
Lydia Davis
Anyone who knew the recipe of the alchemists could make gold, but only the artisans of Murano could make glass so fine, one could nearly touch one's fingers together on either side; cristallo without an imperfection or blemish, clear as the sky, with a sparkle to rival that of diamonds.
Ruth Nestvold
Conception my boy fundamental brainwork is what makes the difference in all art.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians - any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.
Abdullah Yusuf Ali
During the day, the library is a realm of order.
Alberto Manguel
If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle.
Alberto Manguel
I hesitate in everything, often without knowing why. How often I've sought – as my own version of the straight line, seeing it in my mind as the ideal straight line – the longest distance between two points. I've never had a knack for the active life. I've always taken wrong steps that no one else takes; I've always had to make an effort to do what comes naturally to other people. I've always wanted to achieve what others have achieved almost without wanting it. Between me and life there were always sheets of frosted glass that I couldn't tell were there by sight or by touch; I didn't live that life or that dimension. I was the daydream of what I wanted to be, and my dreaming began in my will: my goals were always the first fiction of what I never was.
Fernando Pessoa
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
Julio Cortázar
Persons curious in chronology may, if they like, work out from what they already know of the Wimsey family that the action of the book takes place in 1935; but if they do, they must not be querulously indignant because the King's Jubilee is not mentioned, or because I have arranged the weather and the moon's changes to suit my own fancy. For, however realistic the background, the novelist's only native country is Cloud-Cuckooland, where they do but jest, poison in jest: no offence in the world.
Dorothy L. Sayers
all the tall mad mountains of her mind
Anne Carson
No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....
Alexander Trocchi
When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat. So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets describe this struggle from within a consciousness – perhaps new in the world – of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.
Anne Carson
Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
Ken Liu
Fools, their wisdom weak,are their own enemiesas they go through life,doing evilthat bearsbitter fruit.
Juan Mascaró
For once desire is articulated in words it does not sit still, but displaces, drifting metonymically from one thing to the next. Desire is a product of language and cannot be satisfied with an object.
Bruce Fink
There is far more happiness in a life that is your own than a life in which you are handed the lines to say and shown the gestures to make. Do not ever be ambitious.
Ken Liu
I am nothing.I'll never be anything.I couldn't want to be something.Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
Fernando Pessoa
Remembering tires a person out. this is something they don't teach us. Exercising one's memory is an exhausting activity. It draws our energy and wears down our muscles.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez
Valentine WeatherKiss me with rain on your eyelashes,come on, let us sway together,under the trees, and to hell with thunder.
Edwin Morgan
In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, “suffering together” or “empathy,” although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others’ ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. “Responsiveness” defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge—loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness.
Keith Dowman
I know most people want others to have good lives, and, when they understand the situation, they will do what they can to steer the world back toward kindness. This is when human beings, I believe, are most admirable.
Daoud Hari
The way in which art creates desire, I guess that’s everywhere. Is there anyone who hasn’t come out of a movie or a play or a concert filled with an unnameable hunger? … To stand in front of one of [Louis Sullivan’s] buildings and look up, or in front, say, of the facade of Notre Dame, is both to have a hunger satisfied that you maybe didn’t know you had, and also to have a new hunger awakened in you. I say “unnameable,” but there’s a certain kind of balance achieved in certain works of art that feels like satiety, a place to rest, and there are others that are like a tear in the cosmos, that open up something raw in us, wonder or terror or longing. I suppose that’s why people who write about aesthetics want to distinguish between the beautiful and sublime… Beauty sends out ripples, like a pebble tossed in a pond, and the ripples as they spread seem to evoke among other things a stirring of curiosity. The aesthetic effect of a Vermeer painting is a bit like that. Some paradox of stillness and motion. Desire appeased and awakened.
Robert Haas
People who prefer to believe the worst of others will breed war and religious persecutions while the world lasts.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Injustice is a rule of the service, as you know very well; and since you have to have a good deal of undeserved abuse, you might just as well have it from your friends.
Patrick O'Brian
The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.
Dorothy L. Sayers
We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.
Javier Marías
How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The human soul is an abyss
Fernando Pessoa
Parker looked distressed. He had confidence in Wimsey's judgment, and, in spite of his own interior certainty, he felt shaken."My dear man, where's the flaw in [this case]?""There isn't one ... There's nothing wrong about it at all, except that the girl's innocent.
Dorothy L. Sayers
...Thought lengths it, pulls an invisible world through a needle's eye one detail at a time, ...
Jennifer Grotz
The Buddha is like space, with no inherent nature; appearing in the world to benefit the living, his features and refinements are like reflections.
Thomas Cleary
Just as one can arrange bits of iron, etc, into a hermetically sealed box which imprison other pieces of matter, so one can arrange thoughts into a box too, which effectively imprisons other thoughts.
Nanamoli Thera
Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.
Julio Cortázar
Oh, as far as unsexing is concerned, who are we to throw stones? With us any girl that cannot find a husband is unsexed. If she is very high or very low she may go her own way, with the risks entailed therein, but otherwise she must either have no sex or he disgraced. She burns, and she is ridiculed for burning. To say nothing of male tyranny—a wife or a daughter being a mere chattel in most codes of law or custom—and brute force—to say nothing to that, hundreds of thousands of girls are in effect unsexed every generation: and barren women are as much despised as eunuchs. I do assure you, Martin, that if I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword; I should emasculate right and left. As for the women of the pahi, I am astonished at their moderation.
Patrick O'Brian
Memory weaves and traps us at the same time according to a scheme in which we do not participate: we should never speak of our memory, for it is anything but ours; it works on its own terms, it assists us while deceiving us or perhaps deceives up to assist us.
Julio Cortázar
slow it isa slow businessto grow a few wordsto say love
Anselm Hollo
Light jumping out of window is staring the dark from afar.
Suman Pokhrel
Literature destabilizes thought by breaking open language and smuggling in sound, rhythm, and image--an invasion of aesthetics. More easily than analytic writing, poetry can emancipate itself from the standard definitions of words, enabling a breakthrough to new (and perhaps wayward or even nonsensical) meaning, which can then develop after the fact--different at each new reading. Literary language is presumptuous. It dips into the unknown in order to get nearer to a truth different from that of the superficially visible. As the poet Franz Josef Czernin described it, it is as though one step after another into emptiness could become a ladder. Literary writing can take the writers themselves by surprise; it can disturb and disappoint them--for stirring up turmoil is inherent in metaphor. Thus with every flash of understanding that comes from hearing or reading a poem, the fundamental work of thinking is taken up anew.
Marie Luise Knott
...when I look at and study the ranks of my books - for I have put the name of each author on the binding - I feel as if I am looking at the holy graves of those who wrote them.
Pietro Candido Decembrio
To be perfectly honest with you, I think it's reckless to love and trust another person. It's clearly foolhardy.I'd like it very much if the many daredevils who go ahead anyway, enjoyed this book.
Kaori Ekuni
Everything is interconnected. My readings of classical authors, who never speaks of sunsets, have made many sunsets intelligible to me, in all their colors. There is a relationship between syntactical competence, by which we distinguish the values of beings, sounds and shapes, and the capacity to perceive when the blue of the sky is actually green, and how much yellow is in the blue green of the sky. It comes down to the same thing - the capacity to distinguish and to discriminate. There is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends of the grammarians.
Fernando Pessoa