Quotes by Translators - Page 5

Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

W.S. Merwin

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

Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Lord Peter was hampered in his career as a private detective by a public school education. Despite Parker's admonitions, he was not always able to discount it. His mind had been warped in its young growth by "Raffles" and "Sherlock Holmes," or the sentiments for which they stand. He belonged to a family which had never shot a fox. 'I am an amateur,' said Lord Peter

Dorothy L. Sayers

Her marble tears run down her marble face.A stranger is someone who has no handkerchief.Who has no words to say.Whose shadow mind is burningas he sits watching her handsand thinks how rare!to see a Romantalkwith no gestures at all.

Anne Carson

I like desires like childrenand their playsthat tease me now and then intoknowing life.

Suman Pokhrel

Night and day the streets resounded with music, song, and the clinking of chalices and tankards, for it is well known that nothing is such thirsty work as the acquisition of knowledge.

Andrzej Sapkowski

Every day I would run to the library to get new books. Reading was a passion: I wanted to understand life. I read Dostoevsky and Brehm, Jules Verne and Turgenev, Dickens and the Zhivopisnoye Obozreniye; and the more I read, th emore I doubted everything. Lies surrounded me on all sides; one moment I wanted to run off to the Indian jungle, the next to throw a bomb at the governor-general's house on Tverskaya, the next to hang myself.

Ilya Ehrenburg

And if someone has friends, and he loses everything in spite of that, it's obvious the friends are to blame. For what they did, or for what they didn't do.

Andrzej Sapkowski

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

That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt.

Paul Bowles

These are some of the characteristics of the state of mind which the creation and appreciation of haiku demand: Selflessness, Loneliness, Grateful Acceptance, Wordlessness, Non-intellectuality, Contradictoriness, Humor, Freedom, Non-morality, Simplicity, Materiality, Love, and Courage.

R.H. Blyth

You have to hate them, you mean? You can’t decide: I will or I won’t hate them?”Amar did not completely understand. “But I hate them now,” he explained. “The day Allah wants me to stop hating them, He’ll change my heart.”The man was smiling, as if to himself. “If the world’s really like that, it’s very easy to be in it,” he said.“It will never be easy to be in the world,” Amar said firmly. “Er tabi mabrhach. God doesn’t want it easy.

Paul Bowles

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begun upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time.

Thomas de Quincey

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old glue, releasing perfume; closing with a solid thump.

John Crowley

Facts are like cows. If you look them in the face long enough, they generally run away.

Dorothy L. Sayers

each morning we’re born againof yesterday nothing remainswhat’s left began today

Anselm Hollo

He was being about as protective as a can-opener.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Why do you think politicians send soldiers to the wars they declare, if, of course, they still go to the bother of declaring them. . . . mediation, keeping a distance from the actual events and being privileged enough not to have to witness them.

Javier Marías

Here be dragons to be slain, here be rich rewards to gain;If we perish in the seeking, why, how small a thing is death!

Dorothy L. Sayers

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

We keep asking where they have gonethose years we remember and wereach for them like hands in the night

W.S. Merwin

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

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

There is often no line between perfection and evil.

Ken Liu

What Saint has ever won his crown without first contending for it?

Jerome

We may properly and profitably amuse ourselves by distinguishing those writers who are respectively 'father-ridden,' 'son-ridden,' and 'ghost-ridden.' It is the mark of the father-ridden that they endeavor to impose the idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that his is the whole of the work...Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea...The ghost-ridden writer, on the other hand, conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea...It may serve as a starting point to say that, whereas failure in the father may be roughly summed up as a failure of thought and a failure in the son is a failure in action, failure in the ghost is a failure in wisdom--not the wisdom of the brain, but the more intimate and instinctive wisdom of the heart and bowels.

Dorothy L. Sayers

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

All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever really cared about is my inner life. My greatest griefs faded to nothing the moment I opened the window onto my inner self and lost myself in watching.I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.

Fernando Pessoa

Nothing is more comical than seriousness understood as a virtue that has to precede all important literature

Julio Cortázar

‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

Robert Hass

The spirit of Christ is the spirit of missions. The nearer we get to Him, the more intensely missionary we become.

Henry Martyn

Forgiveness offered -especially when so undeserved - cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break....love did what hatred can not and never will.

Charles Martin

Digestion of words as well; I often read aloud to myself in my writing corner in the library, where no one can hear me, for the sake of better savouring the text, so as to make it all the more mine.

Alberto Manguel

Do what thy manhood bids thee do.

Sir Richard Burton

Every morningI wake up with the newsof bloodshed.I feel my body,desperate to know whetherI’m still alive.

Suman Pokhrel

To duplicate meanings is to isolate the consciousness.

Floriano Martins

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