Quotes by Translators - Page 19

His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or
Dorothy L. Sayers
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
And the time sundials tellMay be minutes and hours. But it may just as wellBe seconds and sparkles, or seasons and flowers.No, I don't think of time as just minutes and hours.Time can be heartbeats, or bird songs, or miles,Or waves on a beach, or ants in their files(They do move like seconds—just watch their feet go:Tick-tick-tick, like a clock). You'll learn as you growThat whatever there is in a garden, the sunCounts up on its dial. By the time it is doneOur sundial—or someone's— will certainly addAll the good things there are. Yes, and all of the bad.And if anyone's here for the finish, the sunWill have told him—by sundial—how well we have done.How well we have done, or how badly. Alas,That is a long thought. Let me hope we all pass.
John Ciardi
Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.
August Wilhelm Schlegel
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
Fernando Pessoa
Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.
Paul Bowles
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it.
Moses Hadas
My past is everything I failed to be.
Fernando Pessoa
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
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.
Czesław Miłosz
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.
Jerome
We are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed.
Ken Liu
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
What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him with be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.
Lydia Davis
Never judge someone by their relatives.
Charles Martin
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined?...Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?...And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?...Is not the great defect of our education today---a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned---that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.
Dorothy L. Sayers
[Today's high schoolers are required to read] a couple of Shakespeare plays...the couple of Shakespeare plays function as an inoculation – that is, you get exposed to 'half-dead Shakespeare virus', and it keeps you from ever loving Shakespeare again, your whole life long. It would be much better if they didn't do that at all!Because [the students] have no linguistic preparation for it, and no cultural or historical preparation for it. They've not been reading English poetry, so the language strikes them as completely bizarre […] and they have no historical place to put it, so they don't know what's going on. All they know is that they're 'supposed to like it'.
Anthony M. Esolen
If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.
John Crowley
For those of you who may be homeschooled: high school is that four-year asylum where they put teenagers because we have no idea what else to do with them.
Anthony M. Esolen
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
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
What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him-but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Men's lives are short .The hard man and his cruelties will beCursed behind his back and mocked in death.But one whose heart and ways are kind - of himstrangers will bear report to the whole wide world,and distant men will praise him.- Penelope in Robert Fitzgerald trans. THE ODYSSEY (364)
Robert Fitzgerald
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
The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.
Ken Liu
The key question, it seemed to him, was that of whether man was to obey Nature, or attempt to command her. It had been answered long, long ago, claimed Moss; man's very essence lay in the fact that he had elected to command. But to Stenham that seemed a shallow reply. To him wisdom consisted in the conscious and joyous obedience to natural laws, yet when he had said that to Moss, Moss had laughed pityingly. 'My dear man, wisdom is a primitive concept,' he had told him. 'What we want now is knowledge.' Only great disillusionment could make a man say such a thing, Stenham believed.
Paul Bowles
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
Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
Anne Carson
The excitable observer will pass judgement first and then make knowledge conform to judgement the prudent observer will first learn to know and then judge according to knowledge.
Thomas Cleary
Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what's in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there's always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.
Fernando Pessoa
A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater.
François Maspero
The Qu'ran is God's song, not ours, not even Muhammad's. To allow such a song to pass through one's body, however imperfectly, is to discover that the instrument is transformed by the music.
George Dardess
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
It was not enough that food aplenty was within Man’s grasp: he wanted more.It was not enough that prey surrendered themselves to Man according to the natural order: Man wanted to cook his prey. Man had discovered fire when lightning stuck and set a tree or two alight, but he was clumsy and greedy and stupid and could not keep the flame alive
David Bowles
I can't think why fancy religions should have such a ghastly effect on one's grammar. It's a kind of intellectual rot that sets in, I'm afraid.
Dorothy L. Sayers
...The Qur'an cannot be translated. ...The book is here rendered almost literally and every effort has been made to choose befitting language. But the result is not the Glorious Qur'an, that inimitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy. It is only an attempt to present the meaning of the Qur'an-and peradventure something of the charm in English. It can never take the place of the Qur'an in Arabic, nor is it meant to do so...
Marmaduke William Pickthall
The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.
Czesław Miłosz
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
Richard Francis Burton
The thought manifests the word;The word manifests the deed;The deed develops into habit;And habit hardens into character;So watch the thought and its ways with care,And let them spring forth from loveBorn out of compassion for all beings.As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.
Juan Mascaró
Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn't be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any incidents or characters that might occupy his theme; perhaps he never would. He could see though the book itself, he could feel its closed heft and see it opened, white pages comfortably large and shadowed gray by print; dense, numbered, full of meat. He sensed a narrative voice, speaking calmly and precisely, with immense assurance building, building; a voice too far off for him to hear, but speaking. ("Novelty")
John Crowley
Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn't a trick, was to take up at once the thing you saw and the reason you saw it as well; to always bite off more than you could chew, and then chew it. If it were self-indulgence for him to cut and polish his semiprecious memories, and yet seem like danger, like a struggle he was unfit for, then self-indulgence was a potent force, he must examine it, he must reckon with it.
John Crowley
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
There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Bountiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxi cation so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway… Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.
Mirabai Starr
One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.
Keith Gessen
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
The mysterious does not spell itself out in capital letters, as many writers believe, but is always between, an interstice.
Julio Cortázar
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
Julio Cortázar
The making of miracles to edification was as ardently admired by pious Victorians as it was sternly discouraged by Jesus of Nazareth. Not that the Victorians were unique in this respect. Modern writers also indulge in edifying miracles though they generally prefer to use them to procure unhappy endings, by which piece of thaumaturgy they win the title of realists.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters.
Lydia Davis
But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.
Thomas de Quincey
One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.
Mirra Ginsburg
Le livre est un morceau de silence dans les mains du lecteur. Celui qui écrit se tait. Celui qui lit ne rompt pas le silence.
Pascal Quignard
The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written., 8 September 1935)
Dorothy L. Sayers
Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature
Julio Cortázar
The best literature is always a take [in the musical sense]; there is an implicit risk in its execution, a margin of danger that is the pleasure of the flight, of the love, carrying with it a tangible loss but also a total engagement that, on another level, lends the theater its unparalleled imperfection faced with the perfection of film.I don’t want to write anything but takes.
Julio Cortázar
this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.
Dorothy L. Sayers
I think it is vanity to want to put into a story anything but the story itself.
Julio Cortázar
We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.
Javier Marías