Quotes by Translators - Page 8

Sati—sampajanna ("Mindfulness and clear comprehension") should be examined carefully from the point of view of the centipede who could not walk when she thought about how she moved her limbs. And also from the point of view of absorption in, say artistic creation and detached observation of it. Absorption in piano playing or painting seems to be "successful" but detached observation or enjoyment of "my playing" or "my painting" seems to have the centipede effect. What are the facts here and what is the lesson to be drawn?
Nanamoli Thera
Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
Ken Liu
I can talk for a long time only when it's about something boring.
Lydia Davis
Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.
Anne Carson
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
Happy are those who choose, those who accept being chosen, the handsome heroes, the handsome saints, the perfect escapists.
Julio Cortázar
He had his choice, and he liked the worst.
John Ciardi
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
Young men think old men are fools, but old men know young men are fools.
George Chapman
Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for
W.S. Merwin
For it is good to cleave to God, and to put our hopes in the Lord, so that, when we have exchanged this poor life for the kingdom of heaven, we may cry aloud: 'Whom have I in heaven but thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.' Assuredly, when we have found such wealth in heaven, we may well grieve to have sought after poor passing pleasures here on earth.
Jerome
Oh, Heidi! Heidi!" Marta exclaimed at last. "This is your garden. I know it even though you have not told me. Do you suppose in Heaven it is any more beautiful than this?""I sometimes think that Heaven is all around us, if we only have eyes to see it," Heidi said softly."And on the Alm too?" questioned Marta."Yes, and in Dorfli. Even in the chateau which seems so gloomy now. There must be a little Heaven there as well. And if not, Marta, why not make it so?
Charles Tritten
Perhaps he still hopes. If there’s any justice in the Gods’ injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they’re impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they’re trivial....Every dream is the same dream, for they’re all dreams. Let the Gods change my dreams, but not my gift for dreaming.
Fernando Pessoa
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
Those men and women of Yangzhou died a hundred years ago, Tian Haoli, and nothing can be done to change that. But the past lives on in the form of memories, and those in power are always going to want to erase and silence the past, to bury the ghosts. Now that you know about the past, you're no longer an innocent bystander. If you do not act you are complicit with the Emperor and his Blood Drops in this new act of violence, this deed of erasure. Like Wang Xiuchu, you're now a witness. Like him, you must choose what to do. You must decide if, on the day you die, you will regret your choice.
Ken Liu
Beware of those who promise a quick and easy way, for much ease brings many difficulties.
Jonathan Star
Having been ripped open and drained by the crowd When I enter my home, Many homes seem to be waiting for me to give a shape to this life which is about to perish.
Suman Pokhrel
If there is no God,Not everything is permitted to man.He is still his brother's keeperAnd he is not permitted to sadden his brother,By saying there is no God.
Czesław Miłosz
I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing, dancingin astonished skin, inan embrace that creates me.
Wisława Szymborska
We keep asking where they have gonethose years we remember and wereach for them like hands in the night
W.S. Merwin
Oh, let what I am keep on existing and ceasing to exist,and let my obedience align itself with such iron      conditionsthat the quaking of deaths and of births doesn't shakethe deep place I want to reserve for myself eternally.
Mark Eisner
Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child.
Czesław Miłosz
There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head.
Lin Yutang
Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.
Lin Yutang
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all. Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade. My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
Wisława Szymborska
To pretend is to know oneself.
Fernando Pessoa
Every man must find his own philosophy, his attitude towards life.
Lin Yutang
Reality - Dreams = Animal BeingReality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism)Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism)Dreams - Humor = FanaticismDreams + Humor = FantasyReality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom
Lin Yutang
On the Rules of PerspectiveA bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.
Anne Carson
Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys. The sun that gilds the summits will gild them more for him than for someone at the top who must endure the bright light; and the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it.
Fernando Pessoa
We live, I suppose, in the unconfessed hope that the rules will at some point be broken, along with the normal course of things and custom and history, and that this will happen to us, that we will experience it, that we — that is, I alone — will be the ones to see it. We always aspire, I suppose, to being the chosen ones, and it is unlikely otherwise that we would be prepared to live out the entire course of an entire life, which, however short or long, gradually gets the better of us.
Javier Marías
There are three points about stories: if told, they like to be heard; if heard, they like to be taken in; and if taken in, they like to be told.
Ciaran Carson
One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but has been taught not to trust an individual speaker.
Ken Liu
Professional Ketman is reasoned thus: since I find myself in circumstances over which I have no control, and since I have but one life and that is fleeting, I should strive to do my best. I am like a crustacean attached to a crag on the bottom of the sea. Over me storms rage and huge ships sail; but my entire effort is concentrated upon clinging to the rock, for otherwise I will be carried off by the waters and perish, leaving no trace behind.
Czesław Miłosz
But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.
Stephen Mitchell
We hurt one another. We go through life dressing up in new clothes and covering up our true motives. We meet up lightly, we drink rosé wine, and then we give each other pain. We don't want to! What we want to do, what one really wants to do is put out one's hands—like some dancer, in a trance, just put out one's hands—and touch all the people and tell them: I'm sorry. I love you. Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for coming to see me. Thank you. But we can't. We can't. On the little life raft of Mark only one other person could fit. Just one! And so, thwarted, we inflict pain. That’s what we do. We do not keep each other company. We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we'll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.
Keith Gessen
No matter how hard I try to forget you, you always come back to my thoughts When you hear me singing I am really crying for you.
Jane Bierhorst
Men learn wisdom from their sins, not from their righteous deeds.
Marmaduke William Pickthall
What Saint has ever won his crown without first contending for it?
Jerome
I have one head that wants to be good,And one that wants to be bad.And always, as soon as I get up,One of my heads is sad.
John Ciardi
The New or Future Eve is emptied of all inner life and turned into a shell. The bitter irony in this is that her perfection recalls nothing so much as a corpse.
Asti Hustvedt
But when justice is done the world drops away.
Anne Carson
Justice was like coloured balls in a magician's hand, changing colour and shape all the time beneath the light of politics.
Qiu Xiaolong
407Justice was like coloured balls in a magician's hand, changing colour and shape all the time beneath the light of politics.
Qiu Xiaolong
Like honey is the sleep of the just.
Anne Carson
A thought for this Damocletian Age: the trouble with justice is it just isn't it?
Nanamoli Thera
Some have said I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.
Ken Liu
Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.
Czesław Miłosz
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
For a Westerner, it is usually sufficient for a proposition to be logically sound. For a Chinese it is not sufficient that a proposition be logically correct, but it must be at the same time in accord with human nature.
Lin Yutang
The human soul is an abyss
Fernando Pessoa
The rest were nondescript, as yet undifferentiated—yet nondescripts, thought Harriet, were the most difficult of all human beings to analyze. You scarcely knew they were there, until—bang! Something quite unexpected blew up like a depth charge and left you marveling, to collect strange floating debris.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Sometimes I have the feeling that what takes place is identical to what doesn't take place, what we dismiss or allow to slip by us identical to what we accept and seize, what we experience identical to what we never try, and yet we spend our lives in a process of choosing and rejecting and selecting, in drawing a line to separate these identical things and make of our story a unique story that we can remember and that can be recounted, either now or at the end of time, and this be erased or swept away, the annulment of everything we are and do. We pour all our intelligence and our feelings and our enthusiasm into the task of discriminating between things that will all be made equal, if they haven't already been, and that's why we're so full of regrets and lost opportunities, of confirmations and reaffirmations and opportunities grasped, when the truth is that nothing is affirmed and everything is constantly in the process of being lost.
Javier Marías
Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.
Anne Carson
There could be nothing, he reflected, to equal a government which was simply the honest enforcement, by means of the sword, of the laws of Islam.
Paul Bowles
Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne.
Dezső Kosztolányi
From out of your heart, you speak."-Emma, When Crickets Cry
Charles Martin
She stumbled then and Geryon caught her other arm, it was like a handful of autumn. He felt huge and wrong. When is it polite to let go someone’s arm after you grab it?
Anne Carson
By day I am nothing, by night I am I.
Fernando Pessoa
He hams his Brummie accent, I tell myself, the way so many ex-pats ham their lost identity. The moustache is a pose. Yet, he hams this unpredictable matey belligerence, this curiously Midlands attitude. Colin is home away from home, I reflect, even if not the home you ever really liked.
Tim Parks