“Admirable." Translation: Slut. "I'm confident you could have ripped the vampire's heart out with no help from Sir Conall. You would never need a hero to rescue you." Translation: Amazon.”

“I'm an outlaw, not a hero. I never intended to rescue you. We're our own dragons as well as heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”

“Having interests translates as confidence to do and be things on your own without expecting a man to do and be for you. And confidence is attractive. Not to mention independence.”

“We walk into a bar, and you're aware of all the eyes on you. We walk into a bar, and I'm aware of all the eyes on you, too. For you, this translate into confidence. But me? All I can feel is doubt.”

“I don't understand." "How can you not understand?" He pointed at her books. "You read novels. Obviously, I'm here to rescue you. Don't I look like Sir Galahad? ... My strength is as the strength of ten, Because my heart is pure - " Something echoed, far away inside the house - the sound of a door slamming. Will said a word Sir Galahad would never have said, and sprang away from the window.”

“I’ve learned, from working with translators over the years, that the original novel is, in a way, a translation itself. It is not, of course, translated into another language but it is a translation from the images in the author’s mind to that which he is able to put down on paper. Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire. But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire. It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work. The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.”