Quotes

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will."

— Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863)

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1903)

“Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.”

— R.F. Kuang, Babel (2023)

“‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’”

— R.F. Kuang, Babel (2023)

"People may shake their heads wisely today over us and call us dreamers, and say that we had no sense of the reality of history. They fail to see that dreams are also a part of the reality of life, that life without dreams would be unbearable. No change in our way of life would be possible without dreams and dreamers. The only people who are never disappointed are those who never hope and never try to realise their hopes."

— Rudolf Rocker, The London Years, trans. by Joseph Leftwich (2005)

“The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.”

— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)

“The invisible people knew that happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.”

— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)

“The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.”

— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)

“You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.”

— Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (1991)

Nil Illegitimo Carborundum

Don't Let the Bastards Grind You Down

— Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1992)