“As long as human beings speak different languages, the need for translation will continue.”

“If you’ve got a dozen pitchers, you need to speak 12 different languages.”

“Wind does not need translation. It speaks the language of men, of animals and birds, of rocks and trees and earth and sky and water. It does not eat or sleep, or take shelter from the weather. It is the weather. And it lives.”

“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.”

“The experience of time translates itself into language, and language translates itself into distance, which translates itself into longing, which is the realization of time. (…) how sad and strange that I, Jenny Boully, should be the sign of a signifier or the signifier of a sign, moreover, the sign of a signifier searching for the signifies.”

“Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.”