Translator Quotes

It is necessary to note that there are two kinds of chemistry; the one wise and reasonable, even necessary for the extraction of useful remedies from all things in nature.: the other is that foolish and senseless chemistry which is nevertheless the older of the two... The first has been given the name of Chemistry, and the second that of Alchemy.

Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy

I have lost the consolation of faith/ though not the ambition to worship

Superstition is just another form of thought like any other, a form that accentuates and regulates the association of ideas, it's an exacerbation, an illness, but, in fact, all thought is sickness, which is why no one ever thinks too much, at least most people do their best not to.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

Alan Hollinghurst

I manage a toast to the Christmas tree and one to the sweet absurdity in the miracle of the verb to be. Lucky you, lucky me.

Miller Williams

The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.

What I love is slowness. Slow people, slow reading, slow traveling, slow eggs, and slow love. Everything good comes slow.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I can't imagine what it would be like to have sex with a man. To be so intimate with another person. Not to hide anything. I don't know if I could do that. It would have to be a boy anyway, not a grown man, someone as scared as me.

Rachel Klein (novelist)

The long-haired Yak has long black hair, He lets it grow — he doesn't care. He lets it grow and grow and grow, He lets it trail along the stair. Does he ever go to the barbershop? NO! How wild and woolly and devil-may-care A long-haired Yak with long black hair Would look when perched in a barber chair!

William Jay Smith

The Lord's appearing, His coming back, is a warning, an encouragement, and an incentive to us; we should love His appearing and look forward to it with earnest expectation and joy.

We do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary crisis is really our own depravity writ large.

Philip Sherrard

A translator is essentially a reader and we all read differently, except that a translator's reading remains in unchanging print

Gregory Rabassa

I had been proud of my awareness, aware of my pride, and proud of that awareness again. It went on like this: How clever I am that I know I am so stupid, how stupid I am to think that I am clever, and how clever I am that I am aware of my stupidity, etc.

Janwillem van de Wetering

Wherever the Jew is found he is a problem, a source of unhappiness to himself and to those around him. Ever since he has been scattered in your midst he has had to maintain a continuous struggle for the conservation of his identity.

This is strength; this is peace; to feel, in entering on every day, that all its duties and trials have been committed to the Lord Jesus - that, come what may, He will use us for His own glory and our real good!

John Gibson Paton

Happiness is a strange thing. It is something I tend to recognize only after it has passed, when I realize I miss it.

Claire Holden Rothman

I'll be somewhere listening for my name.... You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.

The revolt of the poet is invariably conservative at its roots. … Not politically conservative, but imaginatively conservative, with a profound regard for what is given, as earth or air, sun or moon or stars, or the dreams of man.

I am born for God only. Christ is nearer to me than father, or mother, or sister - a near relation, a more affectionate Friend; and I rejoice to follow Him, and to love Him. Blessed Jesus! Thou art all I want - a forerunner to me in all I ever shall go through as a Christian, a minister, or a missionary....

I think our lives are surely but the dreams
Of spirits, dwelling in the distant spheres,
Who as we die, do one by one awake.

Like the best convenience store in the world, / the mind is always open.

Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.

What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.

Jeanne de Salzmann

I survived, carried on, glad to be like a weed, a wild red poppy, rooted in life.

Miracles happen all the time.
We're here, aren't we?