Quotes by Translators - Page 3

Japan is the first nation in the world to accord 'comic books'--originally a 'humorous' form of entertainment mainly for young people--nearly the same social status as novels and films.

Frederik L. Schodt

The word “consciousness,” it seems to me, can only refer to what one might define provisionally as “the knowing that cannot know itself without intermediary and that cannot function in experience (of which it is an indispensable component) except negatively.”To the question “What is consciousness,” then, a low level provisional answer might be “It is the pure subjective” or “It is the bare knowing of what it is not that constitutes (orders) experience and allows it being.” It must be added that, when consciousness is, it seems to be individualized by what it knows. But on another (higher) level the “is” in the question has still to be questioned, and so the low-level (and logical) answer is only a conventional makeshift, a conventional view, nothing more. And this qualification applies not only to logically inductive and deductive statements necessitating use of the word “is,” but also to descriptive statements that appear in “logical” form, using that term, or any equivalent.

Nanamoli Thera

Kill the snake of doubt in your soul crush the worms of fear in your heart and mountains will move out of your way.

Kate Seredy

And sometimes, when the stars are kind, we read with an intake of breath, with a shudder, as if someone or something had 'walked over our grave,' as if a memory had suddenly been rescued from a place deep within us - the recognition of something we never knew was there, or of something we vaguely felt as a flicker or a shadow, whose ghostly form rises and passes back into us before we can see what it is, leaving us older and wiser.

Alberto Manguel

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

The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how the impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Anne Carson

The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination.

Charles Simic

Serena has spent her life fighting fiction the way good soldiers fight—intent on detecting its presence, harassing it, suppressing it—but I have to find a way to show her she’s mistaken her enemy, to explain to her that whoever suppresses fiction destroys life, and that everything disappears with it, all love, all desire. If the past is an invention, it’s not such a big deal. After all, the future’s an invention, and no one finds that hard to accept.

Enrique de Hériz

You put a new heart in Emma a long time ago, it just wasn’t the kind you were thinking of.” He laughed to himself. “Hope is an amazing thing. I saw it in Emma, saw it with my own eyes.

Charles Martin

I'm old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.

Wisława Szymborska

...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

Being unhappy alone isn't all that much fun, but what's even tougher is playing one's part without forgetting one's lines, coping with other people's compassion, their comments, being there with the right line when they give the cue.

François Maspero

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

Simon Armitage

I know now that the poem in my head, the one that pushed me to the page, begged me - or dared me to be born is almost never the poem that comes out. I suppose it’s like anything born of/with free will and the will to live: once I’ve given the seed, once the juices flow through any sort of birth canal and make it to the ambient air there will, at that point, be forces that come into play that are no longer entirely mine. To forget that each word is a life unto itself is to strangle it dead before it can even take a step.

Juan-Paolo Perre

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn’t heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.

Jeremy Tiang

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

Ideals make reason inaccessible.

Floriano Martins

At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potential in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper.At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside-down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm, down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences, vehicles, tenors, thoughts.The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional.

Ken Liu

Remember that not to be happy is not to be grateful.

Elizabeth Carter

[W]hen I see men callously and cheerfully denying women the full use of their bodies, while insisting with sobs and howls on the satisfaction of their own, I simply can't find it heroic, or kind, or anything but pretty rotten and feeble.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Humor is the whole truth.

Frigyes Karinthy

Most people like praise . . . When it is really deserved most people expand under it into richer and better selves.

Joseph Farrell

The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

But that's men all over ... Poor dears, they can't help it. They haven't got logical minds.

Dorothy L. Sayers

If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.

Lin Yutang

[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

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows... I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul.

Fernando Pessoa

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

a stone / which in its own archaic, simpleminded way / sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

Wisława Szymborska

Our mind has its own ideal time, which is no other but the consciousness of the progressive development of our beings.

August Wilhelm Schlegel

People respond to gentle words than scolding

Mary Kawena Pukui

That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died, I know that, and you've been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we've explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we're having now that a few months have gone by--- but now it's time for you to come back. You have been away long enough.

Lydia Davis

You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a sore spot we don't like to have touched.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

Julio Cortázar

We live longerbut less preciselyand in shorter sentences.

Wisława Szymborska

Y allá en el fondo está la muerte si no corremos y llegamos antes y comprendemos que ya no importa.

Julio Cortázar

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.

Fernando Pessoa

perhaps you know that Ingeborg Bachmann poemfrom the last years of her life that begins"I lose my screams"dear Antigone,I take it as the task of the translatorto forbid that you should ever lose your screams

Anne Carson

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

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

Each arrow you shoot offcarries its own targetinto the decidedlysecrettangle

Paul Celan

It is easy to let go of the string and think: This isn't me, it's the arrow. My hands do not bear the blood of this boy, it's the arrow that killed him, not me. But the arrow does not dream at night.

Andrzej Sapkowski

I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings.

Tomas Tranströmer

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

Robert Hass

She reflected she must be completely besotted with Peter, if his laughter could hallow an aspidistra.

Dorothy L. Sayers

All we know, Midnight. The best of all we know. For Chestry Valley and its master we loved. For Nana. For Sugarloaf and Brimstone Farm. For Pop and Mom and Tom. For the foals to come. For yesterday and for all tomorrows, we dance the best we know. For good-by.

Kate Seredy

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

I don't write like this in order to show how clever and well read I am--though I am rather clever and well read as a matter of fact.

John Heath-Stubbs

Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.

Paul Bowles

Society can only exist on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.

Lin Yutang

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

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

Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate.

Alberto Manguel

I suppose one oughtn’t to marry anybody, unless one’s prepared to make him a full-time job.”“Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who don’t look on themselves as jobs but as fellow creatures.

Dorothy L. Sayers

I like to imagine that, on the day after my last, my library and I will crumble together, so that even when I am no more I'll still be with my books.

Alberto Manguel

He remembered having said to his uncle (with a solemn dogmatism better befitting a much younger man): "Surely it is possible to love with the head as well as the heart." Mr. Delagardie had replied, somewhat drily: "No doubt; so long as you do not end by thinking with your entrails instead of your brain.

Dorothy L. Sayers

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

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

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry.

Lorin Stein

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

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