“Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.”

“Reading a poem in translation," wrote Bialek, "is like kissing a woman through a veil"; and reading Greek poems, with a mixture of katharevousa and the demotic, is like kissing two women. Translation is a kind of transubstantiation; one poem becomes another. You choose your philosophy of translation just as you choose how to live: the free adaptation that sacrifices detail to meaning, the strict crib that sacrifices meaning to exactitude. The poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible, what's between the lines, the mysterious implications.”

“Living as he now lived was like reading a good book in a poor translation...”

“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.”

“People rely too much on their lifelong instincts. Their perception is divided by necessary obedience, which they themselves have become too weak to liberate themselves from. I'd let the Devil read me the bible, before I trusted the Words of God or the Mind of Man.”

“The end of the world is not its destruction, but its translation into Heaven. The reinterpretation of the world is the transfer of all perception to knowledge.”