Quotes by Women Translators

Marguerite Yourcenar

Isabel Burton

Frances Brooke

Catherine Winkworth

Jane Kenyon

Ann Hasseltine Judson

Elisabeth Marbury

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

Being involved in sciences or various arts is not a reason for neglecting the causes of social problems.

Taraneh Javanbakht

Men of an amiable, yielding temper, willing to take the lowest place; to be least of all; and the servants to all...who live near God, and who are willing to suffer all things for Christ's sake without being proud of it - these are the men we need.

Ann Hasseltine Judson

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

Hast thou not seen?
All that is needful hath been
Granted in what he ordaineth.

Catherine Winkworth

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

I find too there are few Friendships in the World Marriage-Proof; especially when the Person our Friend marries has not a Soul particularly capable of the Tenderness of that Endearment... we may generally conclude the Marriage of a Friend to be the Funeral of a Friendship...

Katherine Philips

A state of rest is ungraceful; all nature is most beautiful in motion: trees agitated by the wind, a ship under sail, a horse in the course, a fine woman dancing.

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

The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn't know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles.

Margery Williams

Throughout my life, I have always found that events which seemed at the time disastrous ultimately developed into positive blessings.

Elisabeth Marbury

I saw the desert, it grew upon me. There are times, when I have sorrows, that I hunger and thirst for it...

If man is part and parcel of the universe, and is ruled by the same laws as govern the sky, it is not unreasonable to search the heavens for the patterns of our lives, and for those impersonal attractions which induce our success and our errors.

Marguerite Yourcenar

From having once been a peaceful shepherd, [he] had become the terror of southern Italy. [...] The usual occupation of Crocco's band was robbery of the wealthy Italians of the vicinity, battles with the Italian troops, and the seizure and robbery of rich foreigners, for whose deliverance heavy ransoms were demanded. When a detachment of troops was sent against them, they showed considerable courage. As they knew the country well, with its hiding-places and points of vantage, it was not easy to capture them.
As the country moaned and cursed at it's weeping fate... The Devil himself tempted Italy to follow it's lure of rule and conquest but in the end he has disappeared leaving a weeping country to pick up the ashes.

Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer

The round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.

Would I be able to transfer my contemporary experience as a translator to the past and feel some measure of ease as I brought the Spanish of the seventeenth century over into the English of the twenty-first?

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

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

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

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

Lynne Sharon Schwartz

I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here. Now there is no more catching one's own eye in the mirror, there are no bad books, no plastic, no insurance premiums, and of cours eno illness. Contrition does not exist, nor gnashing of teeth. No one howls as the first clod of earth hits the casket. The poor we no longer have with us. Our calm hearts strike only the hour, and God, as promised, proves to be mercy clothed in light.

I am on the side of those who believe that vice comes from stupidity and consequently that the nearer one draws to wisdom the farther one gets from vice.

Marie de Gournay

I was amongst the virtues like the great Turk in his seraglio of women, and I chose to dwell with that virtue which looked the fairest in my eyes and gave me at that season most pleasure. In short, I made wives of them: I first admired them, then made them my own property, and if they would not submit to my will, I again turned them off and divorced them.

The air is full of a farewell- deserted by the silver lake lies the wild world, overturned. Cities rise where the mountains fell, the furnace where the phoenix burned