Quotes by Translators - Page 4

What is more important for the world right now than preserving ways of living in balance with the earth?
Daoud Hari
If the world allows the people of Darfur to be removed forever from their land and their way of life, then genocide will happen elsewhere because it will be seen as something that works. It must not be allowed to work. The people of Darfur need to go home now. I write this for them, and for that day, ... and for those still living who might yet have beautiful lives on the earth.
Daoud Hari
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
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Fernando Pessoa
Only poets and philosophers see the world as it really is, for only to them is it given to live without illusions. To see clearly is to not act.
Fernando Pessoa
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
Robert Hass
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
Robert Hass
. . . Orpheus struck dumb with hindsight.
A.E. Stallings
The bats inebriate the sky . . .
A.E. Stallings
On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree
W.S. Merwin
Heaven deliver us, what's a poet? Something that can't go to bed without making a song about it.
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
When I was young” … “Before I was twenty, I mean, I used to think that life was a thing that kept gaining impetus, it would get richer and deeper each year. You kept learning more, getting wiser, having more insight, going further into the truth” – she hesitated.Port laughed abruptly. – “And now you know it’s not like that. Right? It’s more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tasted wonderful, and you don’t even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it’s nearly burned down to the end. And then’s when you’re conscious of the bitter taste.
Paul Bowles
The more a victory cost, the more it was esteemed.
Patrick O'Brian
Within himself Jack had not the slightest doubt of victory, but it would never do to let this conviction take the form of even unspoken words; it must remain in the state of that inward glow which had inhabited him ever since the retaking of the Africaine, and which had now increased to fill the whole of his heart - a glow that he believed to be his most private secret, although in fact it was evident to everyone aboard from Stephen Maturin to the adenoidal third-class boy who closed the muster-book.
Patrick O'Brian
May Allah bless you." Or had she said: "May Allah burn you?" He was not sure which: the two Arabic words sounded so much alike.
Paul Bowles
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
I and motherland are one. My name is Million, because for millions do I love and suffer agonies.
Adam Mickiewicz
-and then what happened?- I asked him, but I had no desire to know. Whatever it was, it has to be ugly.
Michael F. Moore
It isnt for wantof something to say--something to tell you--something you should know--but to detain you--keep you from going--feeling myself hereas long as you are--as long as you are
Cid Corman
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
Sceptical Ketman is widely disseminated throughout intellectual circles. One argues that humanity does not know how to handle its knowledge or how to resolve the problems of production and division of goods.
Czesław Miłosz
I like desires like childrenand their playsthat tease me now and then intoknowing life.
Suman Pokhrel
By living a life “against nature,” the deviant or pervert becomes a hero or heroine in decadent fiction.
Asti Hustvedt
The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don't believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry at me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves her or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling.
Lydia Davis
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
How decisive for the Christian educator, or for any educator of good will, is the revelation that man is made in the image and likeness of the three-Personed God? That is like asking what difference it will make to us if we keep in mind that a human being is made not for the processing of data, but for wisdom; not for the utilitarian satisfaction of appetite, but for love; not for the domination of nature, but for participation in it; not for the autonomy of an isolated self, but for communion.
Anthony M. Esolen
As long as everything stayed the same, it seemed possible for him to come back. As long as everything was the way he had left it, his place was open for him. But if things changed beyond a certain point, his place in my life began to close, he could not reenter it, or if he did, he would have to enter in a new way.
Lydia Davis
at the bottom of the ocean is a layer of water that has never moved…
Anne Carson
One difficulty that someone who has been in military/government service during war has, is reconciling his/her pride with their horror.
Kari Martindale
Instead of finishing the sentence she slid a business card across the counter. It listed her contact information for every social media site I'd heard of, and several that were still in beta. Except for Google Plus. Even Internet-addicted fairies have standards.
Alex Shvartsman
Heaven is eternal. The earth endures.The reason for heaven's eternity and earth's enduranceis that they do not live for themselves only, and thereby live forever.The sage steps back but remains in front,the outside always within.Self is realized through selflessness.
Sam Hamill
Or a ghost is a knot in the otherwise smooth flow of time, an electrical storm in a jewelry box, grief perfectly aligned. And sometimes a ghost is a shared thing; sometimes the entire population of a city or country will just happen to look in the mirror at the same time, and from then on there was a city in the sky, as all cities are if we consider that the sky reaches to the ground, and this city, too, thought it was alive, and the candles walked off by themselves.
Cole Swensen
...most words for ghost are pieces of mica that carefully layeredwill make a window out of fire. It's cold and the faces at the windowdo what faces usually do they open onto a genetic historythat looks up suddenly and it's the eyes everyone says you can't say that's not alive
Cole Swensen
I dreaded an invasion of ghosts or, less likely, an invasion of the police.
Adolfo Bioy Casares
It was the artists who finally gave their times and places significance. Paul felt the presence of their ghosts out in the world, just as felt them in his office and in his head. The air was full of them. They were everywhere and always would be.
Jonathan Galassi
At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.
Alberto Manguel
I’ve never known fear; as a youth I fought/ In endless battles. I am old, now,/ But I will fight again, seek fame still,/ If the dragon hiding in his tower dares/ To face me
Burton Raffel
How hard it is to kill hope! Time after time, one thinks one has trodden it down, stamped it to death. Time after time, like a noxious insect, it begins to stir again, it shivers back again into a faint tremulous life. Once more it worms its way into one's heart, to instil its poison, to gnaw away the solid hard foundations of life and leave in their place the hollow phantom of illusion.
Dorothy Bussy
in the linked arms of Bacchus and Aphrodite.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.
Patrick O'Brian
We create eternity out of crumbs of time.
Anna Kamieńska
When this flood blocks the road I am worried more by my soil getting washed, than by getting late to reach my destination.
Suman Pokhrel
The problem with a wish list was what it told you about the person who wrote it. If it's honest, it's a rock-bottom, barebones, clear shot all the way to someone's soul.Hats can do the same thing.
Charles Martin
A little after moonrise Stephen woke. Extreme hunger had brought on cramps in his midriff again and he held his breath to let them pass: Jack was still sitting there, the tiller under his knee, the sheet in his hand, as though he had never moved, as though he were as immoveable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as unaffected by hunger, thirst, fatigue, or despondency. In this light he even looked rock-like, the moon picking out the salient of his nose and jaw and turning his broad shoulders and upper man into one massive block. He had in fact lost almost as much weight as a man can lose and live, and in the day his shrunken, bearded face with deep-sunk eyes was barely recognizable; but the moon showed the man unchanged.
Patrick O'Brian
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
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
The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.
Guy Davenport
For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.
Charles Simic
She is bending over her child. She can’t leave her. Thechild is laid out in state on a table. She wants to take one more photograph of the child, probably the last. In life, the child would never sit still for a photograph. She says to herself, “I’m going to get the camera,” as if saying to the child, “Don’t move.
Lydia Davis
What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?""Everything, since he has a command and I have not.
Patrick O'Brian
For God's sake, let's take the word 'possess' and put a brick round its neck and drown it ... We can't possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.
Dorothy L. Sayers
She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Magic is not something supernatural, but part of the field dynamics of nature.
John Myrdhin Reynolds
But if the Dream Kings were mine, what would I have to dream about? If I possessed the impossible landscapes, what would remain of the impossible?
Fernando Pessoa
I have to choose what I detest - either dreaming which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn't born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together.
Fernando Pessoa
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
I'm almost convinced that I'm never awake. I'm not sure if I'm not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.
Fernando Pessoa
Like every dreamer, I've always felt that my calling was to create. Since I've never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant desiring of the acts I wish I could perform.
Fernando Pessoa
What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.
Fernando Pessoa